This is apparently a question, so I will attempt to address it.

I have no idea what you should or should not do. Every writer tends to carve their own writer-shaped door into the industry, and then they seal it shut behind them, Cask-of-Amontillado-style. (I can make that Poe joke because I was an English major. I have a license for such literary shenanigans; if you are caught making such a pun without the proper degree, you will be hunted.) There exists no One True Way to become a writer except, you know, go read stuff, live a life, and write things down. Keep reading stuff, living your life, and writing things down until you get sorta okay at it, and then later until you maybe get sorta good at it, and hey, ta-da, you’re probably a writer. Maybe even a professional one of some level of success from MEAGER TRILOBYTE to MIDLIST INKSLINGER to GRAND CONQUERING PENMONKEY OF THE REALM.

There, the end, go do it.

*waits*

*notices you’re still here*

Oh, you still want to talk about this English degree thing.

Okay, fine, fine.

You don’t need an English degree. You can get any degree you want. Or no degree. Or two degrees. Fuck it, get three! Or you can drop out of high school. Or be a doctor. Or an engineer. Or a lawyer. Or an international assassin.

I have an English degree.

Just a BA. Never went further.

It did well for me. I never had much trouble getting work, and really, that’s part of the question, isn’t it? This is really a two-part deal: the first is, I want to be a writer, so which program is best to help me learn that skill (and writing is a skill, by the way, one that you can both practice and one that can be enhanced with training). The second part is, but also how do I not starve and die while trying to become a proper penmonkey?

Here’s why you might consider an English degree in that regard.

At the school level, an English degree covers things you ostensibly should love, and it will deepen your appreciation of things like, oh, I dunno, BOOKS and WORDS and STORIES. You will be given a sense of literary tradition from Beowulf on up. But it’s not just Jane Austen and Chaucer, mind you. A well-rounded English program is pretty diverse, and may even let you customize your approach. You’ll learn some history, some journalism, you might learn literary criticism ranging from structuralist crit to feminist crit to all the other schools of criticism. You’ll read poetry, you’ll read essays of early American history, you’ll learn composition and non-fiction, you’ll learn about essays and memoirs and even some technical writing. An English degree was my first exposure to Toni Morrison (who I got to meet and learn from, courtesy of my English program), to Margaret Atwood (*waves*), to James Joyce, Joseph Campbell, to Maus. We studied comic books and mythology and — I mean, it was awesome. I had a great program with (mostly) amazing teachers. Being a writer has been helped by reading deeply and diversely and by getting to see the breadth and depth of the tradition of what I wanted to do.

Then, on the career side of things, English majors do okay. I never had anyone roll their eyes at an English degree on the employment side — I had people in my family or life roll their eyes as if it was a toilet paper degree, but it’s not. Some English majors I know are now lawyers. Some work for huge banks or tech companies, others in marketing and advertising because, y’know, the ability to communicate and write and to know the history of the written word will serve you well across a wide variety of fields. It’s a little like a Swiss Army knife degree — it has a lot of tools packed into it. None of them are single-serving laser-focused, but it allows you to jump into the workforce fairly quickly. I had jobs in advertising, tech, in the library system, all because of one measly-ass English degree. I always did pretty well financially. It was not a bad choice, and most of the English majors I know are in fairly healthy shape, job-wise. Some aren’t using any part of their training, but it also didn’t hurt them. Others are using some of their degree, and others still are successful writers, playwrights, even screenwriters.

So, is it a bad idea?

Probably not. English degree gets you the one-two punch of: COOL WORDSMITHY POWERS and NOT ENTIRELY AWFUL JOB OPPORTUNITIES SO YOU WON’T STARVE AND DIE IMMEDIATELY.

Is it the best idea?

Well, how the fuck do I know? Listen, you as a person have a degree of interests and aptitudes. If you are privileged enough to be able to, find a degree that speaks to the things you like and the things you can do, and ride those things to a degree and to a writing career. History, philosophy, tech, art, whatever. None of them will hurt your writing career, and if you work your ass off and are open to learning, I think you’ll be fine. Especially if you never forget that you want to be a writer, which is to say, write your ass off no matter your degree, no matter your training. Work is the purest, cleanest way to be what you want to be. It isn’t always enough, but it’s how it starts.

You wanna be a writer, be a writer.

You wanna get an English degree, get an English degree.

Wanna wander the Earth like Sad Hulk, wander the Earth like Sad Hulk.

No shame for your choices. Just go and do it, and kick ass in whatever you choose.

Imagine a world filled with fierce, fiery beings, hiding in our shadows, in our dreams, under our skins. Eavesdropping and exploring; savaging our bodies, saving our souls. They are monsters, saviours, victims, childhood friends.

These are the Djinn. And they are everywhere. On street corners, behind the wheel of a taxi, in the chorus, between the pages of books. Every language has a word for them. Every culture knows their traditions. Every religion, every history has them hiding in their dark places. There is no part of the world that does not know them.

They are the Djinn. They are among us.

The Djinn Falls in Love features stories from Nnedi Okorafor, Neil Gaiman, Helene Wecker, Amal El-Mohtar, Catherine King, Claire North, E.J. Swift, Hermes (trans. Robin Moger), Jamal Mahjoub, James Smythe, J.Y. Yang, Kamila Shamsie, Kirsty Logan, K.J. Parker, Kuzhali Manickavel, Maria Dahvana Headley, Monica Byrne, Saad Hossein, Sami Shah, Sophia Al-Maria and Usman Malik.

* * *

Be curious.

‘The djinn are just like humans in many ways: they have free will, they are good, or evil, or undecided. They fall in love, they fight, they weep. In Bangladesh, djinn are known primarily for haunting people, or for being enslaved by magicians. Everyone believes in them, from villagers to city elites, and it stretches from a hardcore “I’ve seen djinn” belief to a more tentative “I don’t want to know” type of thing. I was surprised how widely accepted, how casual this belief is.

This made me wonder what the djinn are doing the rest of the time, when they’re not pestering humans or being captured by them. Presumably a large part of djinndom is not involved in these two activities, and are going about their normal life. What, for example, do djinn do to pass the time? They are long lived, so surely they get bored? What kind of technology do they have? Have they gotten to Mars yet? Are they watching Netflix? I must know these things. Or failing that, I’m just going to make up the answers.’

– Saad Hossain, “Bring Your Own Spoon”

Write what you don’t know.

‘”Write what you know” is all well and good, but I find writing what I don’t know is way more exciting. I know about djinns. I know the stories about them and how scary they can be, because growing up in Pakistan, they were the bogie man used to scare us into obedience. I know about villages in Pakistan’s North-West where Taliban commanders are the central authority. And I know U.S. controlled drones drop bombs on them from on-high, sometimes killing those commanders, often killing everyone else too. Those things are native to my land and my personal knowledge-base. What is alien, what is unknown to me, are the lives of the drone operators sitting somewhere in America. Those are the unknowns to me as the writer, even if they would be the most recognisable elements of the story to many readers.

Researching the numb greyness of drone operators’ lives, studying the geography of Alomogordo city in New Mexico, and then trying to describe it all with feigned confidence, those were the most joyous elements of the writing. I got to learn about things I knew nothing off and push work into directions I didn’t know if I had the skill to take it. Once the story began working itself out, it dictated the style as well. Inverted commas seemed intrusive. If I wanted to convey the bland realness, I’d have to do without them, and then pare down the description as well. Both are stylistic choices I never would have known to make until the writing began. Writing what you know can be comforting and safe, but if I want to write a horror story that will, hopefully, frighten the reader, then it’s only fair that I also be just as scared.’

– Sami Shah, “REAP”

Do/Don’t screw around with history.

‘Don’t screw around with history. The study of history isn’t just an exercise in saying where we came from – it is an examination of who we are now. We all of us will see the past through the lens of the present, and if you decide that your past is a shiny one in which busty maidens loved to flirt with sword-wielding kings of justice while happy peasants enjoyed a humble life of shovelling cow-dung, then your world is… in need of a bit of a kick in the nethers, pardon my saying so. Because if you cannot see the past, and cannot see that the act of seeing expresses something about yourself, then you will never know your present.

Screw around with history! I know you put a lot of effort in finding out exactly what kind of throne Suleyman the Magnificent sat upon while holding his divan… however if it doesn’t have a bomb hidden under it, or the secret of eternal youth hand-stitched into the upholstery, it is dull. Atmosphere is not the same as pastsplaining. You’re here to create fun stories full of sound, colour and soul. History is full of stories that can be the starting point for something else – and if it teaches us to see ourselves differently, then permit yourself to see it through the prism of wonder and imagination too.’

– Claire North, “Hurrem and the Djinn”

Omne Trium Perfectum.

‘When writing my story, I knew I wanted to do something more form-ally playful than my usual writing. In novels, it’s easy to get caught up in The Rule Of Three – three acts, three parts, three recurrences. Like nature, threes are everywhere. I really wanted to push away from that in this story. I wanted to deny it, and deny it hard. Only, as soon as I started thinking about Djinn, I thought of – what else? – three wishes. It’s a trope, but by god it’s a good and writerly one. Hard to escape, when you’re me. So, I thought: what if I don’t push against threes, but lean into them instead? There are three acts to a story; but what if each act had three acts of its own? And what if each of those sub-acts, actually, was kind of informed by anything other than the action in the act in which it was taking place? And then what if there was a wrapper story that itself had three acts, but those three acts were the acts of the —

It was a lot. A lot a lot. Because, above all this, I’m also a writer who likes clarity, who likes structure that feels natural. Who enjoys telling a story, even if that story isn’t always not-dark. (Oh by the way, my Djinn story is totally dark.) But that rule of three… I kept coming back to it. Even as my story tied itself into knots in my own mind, I kept coming back to that very rigid, oh-so-basic structure: the rule of three. I went Aristotle’s Unities, I went to the fabled ending, I went to a joke, essentially (threes are huge in comedy), and I went to tragedy (as threes are huge in stressing points of drama). And I learned – because even though I’ve written nine novels, teach creative writing, have done this for a long time, I rally against this, and we all try and over-complicate things as much as possible – I learned that sometimes, the simplicity of the rule of three is absolutely for the best.’

– James Smythe, “The Sand in the Glass is Right”

Trust your authors.

‘We learned – above all else – to trust our authors.

We began The Djinn Falls in Love with a clear vision of our book. It was all neatly delineated in a proposal. Outlined and everything. We found the very best people we could, we shared our thoughts with them… and then we did the best thing possible: we let go.

The writers came back with stories that were unexpected, unpredictable and surprising. They took roads we didn’t even know existed, and found amazing, beautiful things at the end. This isn’t the book we outlined. They didn’t give us what we wanted – they gave us what we never could’ve known we wanted. And The Djinn Falls in Love isn’t ‘our’ vision – it is all of ours. And it is far, far better for it.’

– Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin, editors, The Djinn Falls in Love

* * *

The Djinn Falls In Love: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

No, it’s not a macro, but it’s what you’re getting.

I love that owl.

That little screech owl is me, every Monday morning.

Also every morning, Tuesday through Sunday.

SO HEY HI WHAT’S UP.

Well, first and foremost, this happened.

And Empire’s End also hit a buncha other lists, too, which is super lovely.

Oh, also —

IT’S TIME FOR MIRIAM BLACK TO LAY THE SMACK DOWN.

At Unbound Worlds, they do these annual SFF pop culture cage matches — taking characters from beloved books and stories and pitting them against each other in fictional match-ups.

It’s rad. And this year’s 2017 match is open for bad-ass business.

And, bonus: Miriam Black is one of the competitors.

Click that link and it’ll take you to her fight, which is against Molly Millions, the sharp-nailed mirrorshades street samurai from the mind of the master, William Gibson.

I got to write their cage match, so check it out.

Then, if you’re so inclined to throw a vote her way to keep her fighting, please do.

I think that’s it for this morning.

TIME TO TEACH MONDAY A LESSON.

*presses button*

*Monday explodes*

Today, I’m going to give you a pair of themes.

You will choose one, and write a story using that theme.

1. Doing a good thing sometimes means being evil.

2. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Two themes in opposition to each other.

Choose one, write.

Length: ~1000 words

Due by: 3/10, Friday, noon EST

Post at your online space. Give us a link. The usual.

Needless to say, I am very excited, and I will stand quietly in the shadow of Neil Gaiman, trying not to disturb him while unobtrusively breathing this rarefied air.

Thanks all to those who bought Empire’s End and have said nice things about it.

The book also landed at #26 on the USA Today list, and #1 on Audible.

Aftermath debuted at #4 on the NYT when it debuted.

Life Debt debuted at #9.

And now, Holy Huttslime, Empire’s End at #3.

I will gladly take that, thank you.

And for some other news:

Tor.com reviewed Thunderbird — and basically gave one of the greatest opening paragraphs to a review of one of my books ever, ever, ever:

“You don’t know it yet, but you’re about to fall in love with a woman named Miriam Black. It won’t be an easy relationship, no siree. She’s going to enchant you with her psychic abilities, splinter you with her vicious tongue, lure you in with her firecracker attitude, and frighten you with cruel circumstances. Sometimes you’ll need a break from her all-consuming intensity and sometimes you’ll be so obsessed you won’t be able to let her go. The longer you stick with her, the more her icy heart will melt until she drowns you. And you’ll love every. fucking. moment.”

(Also amazing, the concluding paragraph:)

“For me, reading one of Wendig’s books, especially the Miriam Black series, is an act of complete absorption and total abandon. Your whole world narrows down to Miriam and trying to figure out how she’s going to get out of her latest death-defying scrape. Little else matters. While the book was in my greedy hands I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t even more from the damn couch. I needed to know what happened to Miriam Black as badly as she needed a nicotine fix. Do yourself a favor and buy the whole series. And if Saga hasn’t formally picked up books 5 and 6 yet, OMGYOUREKILLINGMEDOITALREADYINEEDTHEM!”

(Saga has totally picked up the 5th and 6th books, btw.)

You will also find me over at Scalzi’s Secret Internet Hut, where I talk about Thunderbird — in particular, about when your book becomes eerily prescient in ways you did not expect, and what it means to find optimism in such troubling revelation.

Also, Febreze Smoothies and Poop Art.

More as I have it.

Thanks, folks.

Well, by the mercy of Sweet Saint Fuck, here we are.

Let’s just go through the journey, shall we?

It took me five years to write Blackbirds. Or, more to the point, it took me five years to learn how to write Blackbirds. I’d written five novels before that, but this one was different. I was into it, but not getting it. A mentorship with a bad-ass dude (salute to Stephen Susco) taught me to outline, to frame it out, and then there it was: a book.

Got an agent very quickly, bing. (*waves to Stacia*)

Got a publishing deal um, not immediately. Was another two years, I think, before the book hit shelves — so, by then, you’re looking at a seven year situation for one goddamn book, and as I am wont to say to new writers: it takes the time that it takes.

Blackbirds, about a very cantankerous, cynical young woman who can see how you’re going to die just by touching you, came out in April 2012, right around my birthday.

Though I wasn’t able to announce it, we had a TV option cooking from literally the day the book came out — when the book came out, I was out in Los Angeles for the LA Book Fest (and I’m back this year, bee-tee-dubs) taking meetings on the book.

I wrote Mockingbird in 30 days. (I’ve seen some snark about how haw haw he writes fast and that’s proof Wendig sucks, but hey, fuck you. Like I said: it takes the time that it takes. And that 30 days wasn’t like, BOOM I WROTE A BOOK IN ONE MONTH, NOW TO IMMEDIATELY CATAPULT IT ONTO A BOOK SHELF — it took additional time in revisions and copy-edits.) Mockingbird, which took Miriam into the heart of a serial killer’s madness and that killer’s predations on a local girls’ private school, debuted also in 2012, about four months after the first book.

The Cormorant, which saw Miriam going up against a returning enemy — who had been upgraded with psychic powers all his own — also had her confront her past in the form of her mother. The Cormorant came out in late 2013, and honestly is maybe my favorite book that I’ve ever written. I actually freaked myself out writing the ending, and loved every moment of it.

Now, here’s where the journey gets interesting.

First, we had a TV show with Starz — and then we didn’t. It was going really well. We had locations and offices and staff and we were talking casting and then we weren’t talking casting and then nothing. That’s the business, them’s the deals, no harm, no foul. (Honestly, I think this timed out with Starz picking up Gaiman’s American Gods. On paper, both books are dark urban fantasy about troubled anti-heroes. And if I had the choice to make a Miriam TV show or an American Gods TV show, I’d make the Gaiman show in the hair’s breadth of a heartbeat.)

Second, we were able to rescue the rights to Miriam from the original publisher, Angry Robot, and then were able to resell them to SAGA, an imprint of S&S, under editor Joe Monti.

Meanwhile, I started writing Thunderbird.

That is to say, I started writing it in 2014, and finished it in early 2015.

Which is further to say, I wrote the book two years ago.

That only struck me recently — way time and memory move, I didn’t realize there had been quite that much time in between the finishing-of-the-book and the publishing-of-the-book. Part of the delayed publication was in part to give a staggered re-release to the first three books, all with new covers. (I, too, miss the Joey Hi-Fi covers, by the way, but the one issue I had with those covers is that on bookshelves it was hard to distinguish between the separate books. And the original publisher didn’t put a series number, so a lot of people read the series out of order because they just didn’t know. The new Adam Doyle covers are dynamic and rad, and put a cool focus on the, ahem, bird component of the story.) Also, the goal was to put the final three books closer together in publication — not one a year so much as one every 6 months or so.

So, two years (!) ago I wrote Thunderbird, and then moved into writing a novella, Interlude: Swallow, which takes place after The Cormorant and before Thunderbird, so it’s something of a bridging story. You can find that, by the way, in the Three Slices anthology, which is a rad project I did with FELLOW PENMONKEY PALS Kevin Hearne and Delilah Dawson. (You’ll also find some Miriam storyworld mythology inside The Forever Endeavor, fyi.)

Then there was the Miriam Black video game, where you literally had to mash buttons in order to drink and smoke and curse at people as you watch them die.

Okay, that might’ve just been a weird dream. No video game.

(Though I’d totally play that video game.)

Meanwhile, I wrote The Raptor & The Wren (out… I think by the end of this year?) and am currently writing the last (gasp!) Miriam novel, Vultures.

And now, here we are.

It is the day.

Miriam Black is back.

Thunderbird is here.

Holy fucking fuck.

Thunderbird: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Obviously, I hope you’ll check it out. It’s the next stop on what has for me been a long, fascinating, and sometimes circuitous journey. Miriam is — well, Miriam is the product of a broken world full of broken people. Nobody is good. Everybody is just shades of bad. It’s a book that’s about mortality and frailty, but it’s also a book that enrobes a tiny little pilot light inside a deep dark pit. And yet, I don’t aim for the books to be bleak, either — despite all the darkness, I like to think they’re exciting and fun and funny even as they are ideally very very fucked up. I’m sometimes asked what genre these books are — I wrote them as horror-crime, they got initially branded as urban fantasy, and are presently called supernatural thrillers. I’m good with any of those, I suppose. Genre is a floating target. Either way, no matter where they fall, I hope you read them, I hope you like them, and I hope Miriam peck-peck-pecks her way into your heart as she has mine. Now, I just have to extract these angry ravens from my chest cavity.

Reviews

B&N SFF Blog:

“Despite a few years away from the series due to a change in publishers, it takes no time to feel right at home with Miriam again. Wendig slams down the accelerator on page one, and never lets up for a moment. His frenetic, shotgun style of prose is a trademark, and nowhere does it hit with as much force, drive, emotion, and explosiveness than when deployed in service to Miriam Black. His descriptions of her inner turmoil—should she get rid of her powers, when they are all she can rely on to uncover the coup—are among the best moments in the book, and truly show the growth this once-broken drifter has experienced since we first met her. Her pain is our pain and her fears are our fears as she puts her hopes on the line again and again to save a young kid who may hold in his grasp a terrifying ability. Wendig surrounds his dark knight with a cast of luridly colorful, broken, vicious, and powered people, especially the woman of the hour, Mary Scissors, whose true powers and motives are something horrifying to behold.”

Publisher’s Weekly:

“This gritty, full-throttle series is what urban fantasy is all about, with bitter humor rounding out lyrical writing. It’s easy to root for this mouthy, rude, insensitive, but innately good young woman, and her story hits the reader like a double shot of rotgut.”

RT Book Reviews (top pick!):

“Once again, Wendig finds a way to blend startlingly powerful descriptions and deep emotional gravity into a gritty, cynical narrative. The action comes fast in this fourth Miriam Black novel and the pace is relentless, but Wendig has control, carefully building his heroine and her world with each chapter in a way that is fascinating and thoroughly entertaining. New readers will have a good deal of catching up to do here, but for those who have followed Miriam’s remarkable adventures to date, the chance to watch her character, and her personal relationships, grow ever deeper and more complicated should not be passed up. A final, utterly devious premonition is sure to leave readers feverish for further installments of this haunting and ever-entertaining series.”