Every year I try to offer up some kind of writerly resolution, some goal, some quest, some authorial charge to lead you into and through the New Year. It’s half-bullshit, as everything here ultimately is — because I’m not you and you’re not me and a single resolution is just a brick in the wall. And writing advice is mostly bullshit, anyway.

I offered up a metric fuckload of resolutions in 2013.

I had a lesser gaggle of resolutions in 2014.

In 2015, I said that as a writer you should be big — and you should be small.

I don’t think I said squat in 2016, because I was just getting over pneumonia? And pneumonia, as it turns out, feels like someone has defecated inside your lung sacks. (EDIT: nope, wait, I did write one: be the writer that you are, not the writer other people want you to be.)

This year —

*whistles*

Listen, 2016 was a nasty beast who nested in a cradle of our heroes’ bones. The year was good for me personally and professionally but, outside that, also felt like a year where we were slowly watching the Death Star being built in front of our eyes and we couldn’t do shitsquat to stop it. And though I hope 2017 has dull teeth and bad eyesight, there’s also a very good chance it is a far greater monster than we can imagine. Best case scenario, the next 2-4 years are gonna get weird.

As such, it feels both necessary and also unmercifully glib to offer up writerly resolutions in any form. I want to say, WRITE YOUR REBELLION, and that’s not a bad idea, to put to paper all your fears and your ideas — give voice to your own idea of resistance. I want to say, BURN IT ALL DOWN TO MAKE GREAT ART — some snarl-mouthed snaggle-toothed middle-finger assertion to leap into the mouth of the monster and cut its throat from the inside with a sword made from your own wordsmithy. I want you to be bad-ass. I want to be bad-ass, too. I don’t want resolutions. I want revolutions. I want fire and steel and anger, I want politics and rage and poison, I want Hunter S. Thompson and Spider Jerusalem and Nine Inch Nails. I want brimstone and batshit. I want heartsblood spattered on the walls that dries in the form of your stories.

At the same time, that’s not going to be all of us.

I don’t even know that it’s me. I don’t know how brave I am or how good I am. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know who I’m going to be as a writer by the end of this year, or next, or in five years. I don’t know who you are or who you will become, either.

What I know is this:

We’re writers, and writers write.

And so, this year’s authorial resolution is far humbler, far smaller —

Write, despite.

What I mean is, no matter what happens, keep writing. No matter how exciting or terrifying the news becomes, write anyway. Force the time. Look away. Focus up. Eyes on your paper. Demand of yourself the creation of stories. Carve out the mental and emotional territory, and the temporal and physical landscape, in order to keep doing what you’re doing. In times like this, the distractions are endless. It’s easy to stop. It’s all too simple to feel overwhelmed by what’s going on and to stare at the Eye of Mordor as it fixes its gaze upon you. And yet, no matter what, you gotta do the thing. You gotta tell the stories. You gotta write it all down.

Write, despite. Or if you’re so inclined, write in spite of everything.

Your art does not need to be rebellious for you to rebel against everything. Just making art is an act outside the natural order. It is already a contravention of the status quo. And it’ll only get moreso in the coming year(s). Write despite. You needn’t aim any higher than that. You can. But the best thing you can do is to give yourself that mandate:

Write no matter what, write anyway, write always.

Have a great 2017. Carve your words into its hide. Tell the monster your tales.

(penmonkey logo above by Amy Houser)

My son associates Star Wars with Christmas a little bit, I think. In particular, both Empire Strikes Back and The Force Awakens, maybe in part because both films have snowy planets? Or maybe it’s just because he watches both around this time of the year and they get stuck in his mind like a seed between the teeth. No idea.

What I do know is, during our most recent rewatch of ESB, I responded particularly to one Han Solo moment. Now, Han Solo gets a lot of moments in ESB, arguably more and better ones than Luke does. This moment, however, is close to the beginning. Luke has gone out and is promptly mauled by the cantankerous Wampa. Han and The Gang learn that Luke has not returned. Night is falling. The temperature on an already frigid planet is dropping.

And Han says, fuck it, I’m gonna go look for my buddy.

So he mounts a Tauntaun — hey, did you know those are lizards? — and rides out.

But! But.

Just as he’s riding out, a short exchange occurs:

Rebel Deck Officer: Your Tauntaun will freeze before you reach the first marker!

Han Solo: Then I’ll see you in Hell!

I joked at the time with my wife, that’s an astonishingly aggressive overreaction by Han. It’s like, “HEY DUDE YOU MIGHT FREEZE TO DEATH,” and Han’s response is basically a nuclear, “THEN FUCK YOU, GUY WHO WAS PROBABLY JUST WARNING ME ABOUT THE SUB-ZERO DEATH TEMPERATURES AND HOW MAYBE MY FUZZY DINOSAUR FRIEND WASN’T EVEN GOING TO SURVIVE OUT THERE SO HOW COULD I POSSIBLY SURVIVE. EAT POOP, JERK!”

We also joked that it was a very good response to really anything anyone ever says to you.

“Have a nice day!” “THEN I’LL SEE YOU IN HELL.”

“That’ll be $7.63.” “THEN I’LL SEE YOU IN HELL.”

“Sir, you can’t park your Tauntaun here.” “THEN I’LL SEE YOU IN HELL.”

But then, of course, as 2016 continued to harangue the world with news of new POUTUS appointments and sad deaths, the phrase came out of my mouth as sort of a grim, teeth-clenching rejoinder to whatever 2016 had on order. It became an automatic response to the year in general, both in what it still brings and retroactively as to what it already gave.

THEN I’LL SEE YOU IN HELL, 2016.

But it occurs to me —

2017 isn’t likely to be much better.

I mean, 2016 wasn’t a blip. It was the beginning of something. All the bad news that’s arisen isn’t isolated. It’s part of a pattern. This shit is just getting started. The bump that was 2016 isn’t a hill we’re climbing over. It’s the top of Cthulhu’s head as he emerges from the deep. Sure, maybe 2017 won’t be as bad as we think. (Alternatively, maybe it’ll be worse!) Yep, 2017 will likely bring some good news along with some bad news, because that’s how things are.

Just the same, I expect it will have some unpleasant surprises in store.

And when it springs its many traps, I will remember Han Solo saying:

“THEN I’LL SEE YOU IN HELL.”

And yet, I’ll also remember what goes into that phrase and why he said it.

I’ll remember this exchange, too:

Rebel Deck Officer: Sir, the temperature’s dropping too rapidly.

Han Solo: That’s right, and my friend’s out in it.

The reason he gets on that tauntaun and rides out into certain icy doom is because his friend’s in the middle of that shit. Night’s falling. The cold is seizing the planet. And he goes out anyway. That’s where we’re at, folks. The mercury in the thermometer is dropping like an elevator with its cable cut. The night will be long. The year ahead will have sharp teeth and and a big mouth and some of us will do better with that Wampa than others. Just the same, our friends are caught in the storm. And we’re going to have to mount up anyway, and ride out even if our snow lizard will be a popsicle by the first marker. Because others need our help.

So, 2017 and all your tricks and all your traps:

I’LL SEE YOU IN HELL.

* * *

I feel like I should also follow up with a personal year-in-review. I tend to do them each year, though this one feels a bit strange given all the utter shitnanigans going on in the world. The year brought with it a lot of personal good, but much of that tastes a bit ashen because I don’t really know what’s coming down the pike for people. (I know, I’m a white dude in America, I’ll be okay. That’s true to a point, though I’ll add that I still need healthcare, and Obamacare has been helpful even with its increased costs. I also have a kid who will have to contend with education in America theoretically sliding down the poopchute.)

Just the same, sure, I’ll play.

I wrote two Star Wars books this year. Life Debt is out, obviously, and Empire’s End is on its way in February. (And Life Debt landed me on the NYT list again, so I certainly won’t be mad at that.) I wrote the fifth Miriam Black book, The Raptor & The Wren, too — plus 2017 will see release of Thunderbird in February.

I also wrote a goodly portion of a new writing book, Damn Good Story, coming next year.

Which means really, I only wrote three (and a half) new books this year, which is light for me.

Of course, I also edited a bunch, and then I got to be a cool kid for a little while and write some comic books — Hyperion and the Force Awakens adaptation, both for Marvel. (Though the latter was really less of an adaptation and more of a translation.)

And I might have some more comic work coming up… *coughs into hand*

As for books released in 2016 —

Atlanta Burns: The Hunt (February)

Star Wars: Life Debt (July)

Invasive (August)

The Forever Endeavor, a novella (October)

Hyperion: Daddy Issues (November)

The Force Awakens TPB (December)

And as to what’s coming out in 2017:

Star Wars: Empire’s End (February 21st)

Thunderbird, Miriam Black #4 (February 27th)

The Raptor And The Wren, Miriam Black #5 (4th qtr, 2017?)

Also sold a pair of books to Del Rey — the first being Exeunt, which will come out in 2018 and is kind of… well, I’m hesitant to say too much and spoil the soup, so let’s just call it my take on The Stand, Swan Song, Station Eleven, The Fireman, and other epic apocalyptic horror stories.

It’s been a good year, overall — at least personally. And I’m hoping to retain some of that as I go forward. The new book deal lets me write a little less per year — so I can cut my output (which is doable, if occasionally a little punishing) and concentrate all fire on Exeunt. Life’s fine, the family’s good. Not sure where 2017 will leave us in terms of everything else, though.

Be well to all of you and best of luck in the New Year. We’re going to need it. And, I suspect, we’re going to need each other. Mount up. Get ready to ride. Because 2017 is almost here.

Thanks for coming by. Thanks for being readers and pals.

Onward, fellow weirdos.

*tauntaun gargle-bleat*

This is an interesting article and you should read it.

(Hi, sorry, popping out of Holiday Exile long enough to write this.)

You will discover, via that article, that there exist people who are ‘truthers’ about facts that are provably false — they believe that it’s the Berenstein Bears and not the Berenstain Bears, they believe there was a genie movie called Shazaam starring Sinbad instead (or in addition to) a genie movie called Kazaam starring Shaquille O’Neal, they believe that the Vader line is “Luke, I am your father,” rather than “No, I am your father.”

And these people are insistent about these points, assuring that their memories are correct. They further believe these truths so hard that their memories are, perhaps, a sign of an alternate universe, or that we’re all living in a giant simulation. Surely, this is proof. It’s proof of a glitch in the Matrix, or evidence that some people have slipped from one universe to another.

Except, no.

Fucking no.

What the —

I mean — god, shit, fuck — what? What?

Stop that.

Stop that right now.

We all get to hold different opinions. I can say, “I think Empire Strikes Back is the best Star Wars movie,” and you can say, “Well, I think it’s Return of the Jedi,” and neither of us are wrong because it’s a matter of taste. It’s subjective. But you cannot say, “The line in ESB is ‘Luke, I am your father,'” because it’s jolly well fucking not. You can’t say, “The best Star Wars movie is The Undiscovered Country,” because that’s not a Star Wars movie. You can’t just say shit and have it be true. You can’t just decide that the information you contain in your head somehow automagically defeats the information that exists in reality. This isn’t some kind of rock-paper-scissors game where MEMORY beats EVIDENCE. Your memory of something is not perfectly reliable. Personal truth does not trump empirical evidence.

You just think it’s one way because somehow, that got into the cultural consciousness. It’s like how the word “literally” sometimes is used to mean the opposite of its original intention — there, the definition can change, because the definition of words is (over time) malleable. But empirical evidence is not. The line that Vader speaks will not one day subtly shift to the other thing just because enough people assert it. (Though in the long-view, in two thousand years when no such copy of the film exists, it is possible to change that narrative. That doesn’t change reality, though, it changes our cultural memory based on misinformation.)

We have to cut this shit out.

This is how fake news happens. This is how echo chambers strengthen their walls. This is how we — and I’ve done it, too, trust me — share bad information, because we find people who also believe the same dippy bullshit. And sometimes it’s not even a matter of confirmation bias, it’s just a matter of repeating a lie long and loud enough until the truth of the lie enters into our memory banks. It over-writes other information and begins to code as “true.” And, solipsistic ding-dongs as we all are, we trust our memory of a thing far more than anybody else’s memory of a thing, even so much so as to concoct fuck-brained theories about we’re not wrong so much as well clearly there’s just a multiverse and I’m from Galaxy 5A73B — ha ha ha, that’s all this is, just a common misunderstanding between multiversal citizens!

No! Fuck! Nooooo.

You don’t get to have your own boutique reality! Your artisanal data might be locally-sourced, but bad news: it fell out of a bull’s ass. Sometimes? You’re just wrong!

And it’s okay to be wrong!

School teaches us that it’s bad to be wrong — but fuck that, it’s okay to be wrong! I dare say it is often necessary to be wrong, provided we discover our wrongness, because being wrong — and learning that we are wrong — is how we then course-correct and learn true shit. We have to be very careful in this Brand New Supposedly Post-Fact Post-Truth I-Believe-In-Political-Unicorns age not to let empirical evidence slip through our grip like so much rope. We must accept information. We must trust in experts, actual experts. We must not diminish or disregard entire bodies of data and expertise merely because it does not conform with our memory or with what our gut tells us. Yes, we can test information. Yes, we can shine a bright light on facts to try to hone and refine and seek deeper data. But that doesn’t mean simply diminishing, disdaining and disregarding actual provable information just because, “Enh, fuck it, I’m pretty sure it’s Berenstein and I’m the expert on my own reality, so eat a bucket of duck dicks, Fake News.”

Trust me. It’s Berenstain. My mother worked for the Berenstains as a house-cleaner, and she did this for many, many years, and at no point did they change their name just to be weird. They did not go and seek out all the copies of their books and with infallible pen change the covers just to fuck with us all. They are not Refugees from a Collapsing Multiverse.

It’s always been Berenstain.

The world has always been round.

Climate change is really real.

Obama isn’t a Kenyan Muslim space alien who’s going to steal your guns.

Just because you think something doesn’t make it so.

Just because you feel one way doesn’t confirm it to be true.

This is going to be a real challenge in the next four years. Hell, it’s already been a challenge. We’re looking down the barrel of a government who wants to give you its own version of facts — which is ostensibly always true of governments, but fascist, autocratic governments are far more interested in delivering worldview and agenda and ideology as facts. It’s an abuse narrative, a cult narrative, where they set themselves as the center of the universe. The sun orbits around them, not vice versa. Real news becomes fake news. Science is sold as propaganda. They insist that they possess truth, they have facts, and all they have to do is tell them to you and have you believe them. But that’s not how reality works. Denying climate change doesn’t stop climate change. Closing your eyes and insisting that the train roaring down the tracks straight toward you will not turn that train to vapor. You cannot believe hard enough to change actual reality. Magical thinking feels great, but it also risks endangering us and shackling us to cuckoopants motherfuckers who happily confirm to the beliefs that come up bubbling out of the pool of our own magical thinking. We have to be hella careful not to give too much life to opinions just because they feel good, or sound right, or because someone else gave them to us on a platter but labeled them as REALLY REAL TRUTHY FACT-FLAVORED STUFF.

Facts are not opinions. They’re facts. They’re things we know. They’re not conspiracies or proof of a multiverse. Reality will never neatly line up with our beliefs, no matter our political stripe.

Reality does not conform to us. We must conform to reality.

Or, to reiterate —

Sometimes, you’re just wrong. And that’s okay.

Practice the phrase with me, and you might need it, because we’re all about to engage in THE HOLIDAYS where we’re thrust up against different people with different viewpoints about things. Practice the phrase, “I could be wrong.” And then practice the phrase, “That is not correct, and here I can prove it.” And then prove it. And if none of that works, flip the table and jetpack right the fuck out of there because you’re arguing with a houseplant.

Now read this, as homework: How To Convince Someone When Facts Fail.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

*sets fire to your holiday decorations*

*guzzles your egg nog*

*vurps*

*climbs out through the chimney with all your presents*

I received over 40 entries for the Awkward Author Photo Contest.

Well-done, everyone. Well-done.

*thunderous applause*

Here, then, are those photos.

You will find a couple famous-faced authors in there, including Jeff VanderMeer, Alethea Kontis, James Sutter, and Yvonne Navarro. Those cheeky little penmonkeys.

Your job, if you choose to accept it, is to go through these photos, find your ONE TRUE FAVORITE, and then go into the comments below and put down the corresponding number. Write only the number, if you please. I need the number to be plainly visible and easy to tally.

You have a week to vote — vote by 12/27, noon EST.

At that point, I’ll note the top four vote-getters, and those people will get a copy of THUNDERBIRD apiece. And they’ll also earn our neverending love. In a diabolical pact.

In the meantime, I’m going to pick my favorite right here and right now.

DRUM ROLL PLEASE:

Huzzah! Congratulations, Jo Anderson. (She has her own Flickr account here.) I chose it because literally every time I look at it I break out into laughter. It’s just so glorious weird. What did that banana do to deserve such dubious scorn? Are the other fruits complicit? Why would this ever be an author photo? IT IS SUBLIME.

So, congratulations!

Which means, voters —

Do not vote for this one. (I’ve tagged it with no number so you know.)

Congrats to Jo, and to the rest of you:

Get to the voting booth below.

*insert some coy reference to the electoral college*

In my mind there are many doorways. Most of them are closed up tight. Behind them is a panoply of — well, who knows what, really, but most of what’s there are various collections of Bad Thoughts. In there are Worries and their big brothers, Fears, and their unruly cousins, Anxieties. I compartmentalize. I give them their rooms and trap them inside.

Lately, the locks have been breaking and the doors have been opening. (It’s like that scene in Ghostbusters, where the — ahem — villainous EPA man demands the containment unit be purged of ghosts. They give in to his demands. And it’s bad.)

Behind these doors are apocalypses big and small, and these variable armageddons play out in the frame of each doorway and so now I’m tasked with simply trying not to look. It’s as if I’m wandering through a museum inside my own head, and some displays and exhibits are simply too abhorrent to view. So I walk past, my eyes closed, mumbling something about, “Oh, what’s over here?” And I find a better, nicer thing to look at.

Obviously, as of late the doors that have been opening contain a variety of Worries, Fears and Anxieties over what’s to come under our unpresidented president. The signs are not ideal. Historians have seen a lot of this before. We don’t know if we’ll get a Berlusconi or a Hitler. We don’t know if he’s just gathering a team of kleptocrats who will (as is his way) run up a tab and stick us all with the bill. We don’t know if he’s really going to try to put up a wall, or register Muslims, or somehow try to put journalists in jail. We don’t know if the alt-right — who are actual Nazis, by the way — will continue to have a voice, or worse, actual power. We don’t know if Russia owned one election or if they own our coming president. Did they hack us just to make us doubt our own democracy? Or do they have a hand firmly up his ass, puppeting him around even still? We don’t know what will happen with climate change — will private enterprise pick up the slack and continue that way because the tide has turned, or will this administration willfully deny the tides, since denying facts and science and reality in total seems part of the official program?

Will there be figures of conscience to lead us out of this madness?

Will there be those we can trust to stand by us and do right even when it is difficult?

Will this be a four-year-blip of woeful ineptitude, or a years-long parade into war, or a new depression, or maybe worst of all, a totally functional autocratic regime where democracy is a thing we talk about in the past tense?

Will there be camps? A white nuclear flash? Boiling oceans? Zombies? Angels?

We.

Just.

Don’t.

Know.

And in that gap, in that empty doorway, any fear can flourish.

Fear, of course, has its evolutionary value. It can mobilize us to protective action.

Fear, though, can also hamstring us. Especially when we’re caught without a way to mobilize.

In this way, fear paralyzes. And so does pessimism. Over time, the Bad Thoughts get out of their cages and they start to weigh us down. It’s important to deal with that. It’s important to find optimism. It’s important to have hope.

Which sounds incredibly twee, of course. Hope is so simple an idea it’s almost glib, a throwaway luxury. It’s something a politician can say to get votes, it’s something you’ll hear in Rogue One to earn an uncomplicated thrill, it’s punchy shorthand without nuance, without teeth. And yet, it’s also the thing that literally saves us time and time again.

Without hope, I don’t know who we are or what we become.

I wrote a book called Invasive*, and in that book is a protagonist, Hannah Stander. Hannah works for the FBI as a consultant, a futurist who helps them see the unexpected threats waiting down the road. She’s the daughter of doomsday preppers, and so is an anxiety-driven character uniquely poised between the Scylla and Charybdis that is crushing pessimism and sheer, bloody-minded optimism. She knows that every advance we make, every step we take, has the chance to go very very right, or very very wrong. We can split the atom to power the world, or split it in half. Even a single knife can be used to whittle a branch or cut a piece of fruit — or it can be used to gut your neighbor and steal his fruit. We are constantly making choices based on angels and devils. We are forever walking the line between evolution and ruination.

In the end, I needed Hannah to have hope.

Every time she’s beaten down, I need her to get back up again.

I needed her to have a way forward. A reason to move. A reason to survive.

One of the things I gave her — one of the tools — was the Dust Bowl.

That is to say, I gave her the Dust Bowl from the 1930s here in America. I studied the Dust Bowl effect for another novel of mine — the cornpunk YA novel, Under the Empyrean Sky — and certainly it’s something you’ll see if you poke your nose through a little Steinbeck.

If you’re not overly familiar, I’ll give the broad strokes: the Dust Bowl was the result of over-eager agricultural exploitation in the middle of our country (and Canada). Over 150,000 square miles of land were overworked with unsophisticated farming techniques. Drought struck. The dirt became dry, and stayed dry. Then it became dust. And that dust got swept up in massive “black blizzards,” some of which even reached the East Coast. The entire middle of our country effectively died. On one Sunday in 1935, over 20 of those black blizzards raged. People couldn’t see a handful of feet in front of them. The very air choked them.

You ever see pictures from the Dust Bowl?

Go ahead, Google it.

You’ll see walls of dust.

You’ll see tractors buried in it.

You’ll see filthy people with masks on.

It looks like a dead world. It looks like the goddamn Apocalypse.

And some people thought it was. It helped worsen the Great Depression. It sent actual plagues of insects and rabbits into towns looking for food. Great black dust-storms raged in the skies.

It was the fucking End Times.

Except, it wasn’t, was it?

The Dust Bowl ended — not necessarily naturally, not on its own, but with new leadership (FDR and his New Deal for America, taking us out of Hoovertown) and agencies like the FSA and the Soil Conservation Service and the Forestry Service, we were able to tackle the core of the problem. Farmers were retrained in new agricultural techniques to stop erosion. Trees were planted as windbreaks — sorry, 200 million trees, just in case you want a number in which to find some proper awe. New grasses were planted to anchor the earth. It took time. There was a bit of a bounceback in the 40s, but another drought in the 50s made some fresh hell. But by the 1970s, the area was transformed. The middle of the country was not dead. It was thriving.

And that’s what I gave to Hannah.

I gave her the Dust Bowl — not as a memory, for she was too young for that — but as a point of historical relation. Something she could look to and, strangely enough, find some optimism. That optimism is guarded and cautious and grounded with iron spikes of reality, because of course the Dust Bowl wasn’t some random event. It was us. We did it. We made it, caused it, worsened it. Just as we (and Hoover) helped worsen the Great Depression. And of course, it’s not like that time was easy for anybody. People lost their livelihoods and others lost their lives. Disasters are like that. They’re not good. Nobody wins.

But it is a sign that we can survive.

And we can learn.

The thing we think is the End of the World isn’t that, after all. It’s the end of something — or at least, a troublesome pause. But the Apocalypses we expect and predict are rarely those. They are transformative. They are terrible. But they rarely end everything. They often form new beginnings, terrible and transformative as they are. The Dust Bowl came, caused in part by us, and it took time, but with industriousness and indomitable will — and smart leadership! — we found our way out of the black blizzard. We stumbled free of the dual apocalypses of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. With FDR, we leveled up to something better, something greater.

That’s the optimism I’m clinging to. It’s not the kind of optimism that just waves it off and says enh everything will be fine, because it won’t. History is clear on that point: it’s never going to just be fine. History is full of tumble and tumult. But history is also full of our response to tumble and tumult, and the long game is one where we persevere.

One where we become better than we were before.

This, I think, is that moment for us.

Things won’t be fine.

Things might get really, really bad.

But we can survive them. And we have a chance to come out better than we were before.

That is the key.

At least, it’s the key with which I close and lock those doors once more. It’s the way I keep the Worries, the Fears, the Anxieties, at bay. The key is hope. The key is always hope.

* shameless note: INVASIVE remains at its $2.99 holiday price: Amazon, B&N, Kobo, iBooks. Hey, shut up, writer gotta eat. And drink. Okay, mostly drink.

Andrea Phillips is an awesome example of humanity, a killer creator, and a pal. Though she will probably disavow that last part, and we’ll again play our funny game where I’m like ANDREA IS MY BUDDY and Andrea is like I DON’T KNOW YOU FREAKSHOW WHY ARE YOU IN MY PANTRY. Ha ha ha, what games, what games. Anyway! Here’s a thing she wrote that you’re gonna read.

* * *

This post was originally meant to be some thinly veiled self-promotional shilling about the serial I co-author, ReMade. (Like you do.) I was going to talk about the blurry line between YA and adult fiction, and make a knockout, completely persuasive case that fans of smart science fiction should be checking works like ReMade out, no matter how old they are.

That was October Andrea. Things have abruptly changed since then. See, November Andrea saw the world turned upside down by politics, and by all the fallout that’s come since then. November Andrea got scared and sad. November Andrea wanted to slow this merry-go-round down so we can talk a little more about love, peace, and tolerance.

Because one thing has become self-evident to me: we have to work our tails off to keep the world trending toward more tolerant, more peaceful, more loving. And one of the most powerful ways that can happen is through art—and specifically through storytelling.

When we look into the mirror of media, we see the real world reflected there (even in our fantasy). We see what heroism looks like, what love looks like, how to make difficult choices. But that reflection is hopelessly distorted, and sometimes extremely harmful.

What the mirror of media shows us is a world that is mostly white, mostly straight, mostly men, mostly coastal, mostly urban and exurban, mostly upper-middle-class, mostly educated. There aren’t so many people of color or people with disabilities in our media. Not many people with Southern accents, either. People of deeply held religious faith are seldom represented, except perhaps actual clergy.

You can find exceptions to every single one of these categories, especially in genre fiction. But by and large, this is the world that Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and book publishing tell us is the only world that matters.

This uniformity plays out in our plotting and subtext, too. We tell a lot of stories about lone mavericks acting alone and against the rules; victory often comes through violence, and not compromise or diplomacy. There are clear-cut good guys, and that means there are clear-cut bad guys, too. The important and messy nuance of the world is erased.

And because of a few strange quirks of our brains, we accept these images and ideas as if they were a valid reflection of the world. We’re monkeys, and we do what other monkeys do, and think the way other monkeys think. Even when we know those monkeys aren’t even real. That effect is so powerful that you can, say, directly trace youth smoking rates and how often smoking is shown on the big screen.

This is why advertising works. This is why propaganda works. This is why the truthfulness of our journalism matters. The things your brain is exposed to inevitably become a part of your worldview — even if you disagree when you see it.

The results play out in the real world, writ small and large, all the time. Real black women with medical degrees are dismissed in mile-high medical emergencies because they don’t look the part that we’ve been trained to expect. We drop rings in glasses of champagne and go down on one knee to propose marriage, because that’s what we’re supposed to do, right? We talk about a “presidential look” as if governance and casting were remotely related topics. And we cast our political opposition as “bad guys” who must be stopped at any cost—and the cost for all of us is, make no mistake, incredibly high.

That means something significant for writers who make stories that are all-white and all-straight, stories where women are subservient or silent, stories where there are objectively evil races or religions. When we tell these stories, we aren’t just quietly avoiding politics. Far from it. We are actively aiding and abetting the forces of intolerance. If we’re not questioning the status quo, we are supporting it with our silence. There’s no middle ground.

And that means artists have a high goddamn responsibility, and we need to wield it as carefully as we can. We’re afraid of what we don’t know. That’s just human. But it turns out, across cultures and countries, despite class and race, we are more alike than we are different.

So we need to show that, again and again and again. We need more stories about how different peoples can learn to coexist peacefully; stories about institutions that work to protect people; stories about overcoming corruption, about immigrants thriving, about peaceful protest working, about people learning and growing and shedding their fear of the other. We don’t just need the same stories with new faces in it. We need whole new stories.

This is the only way we can learn how to be better people: to have someone show us exactly what that looks like. It’s infinitely easier to do and be something once you’ve seen someone else show you how that trick is done, and the more you see it, the easier it gets.

Me? I’m trying to walk the walk already. And that brings us back to ReMade, where we have urban and rural kids; people of color and of faith; queer, straight, and maybe-don’t-know. It shows in the kind of story we’re choosing to tell, too. None of our characters is the special chosen one. None of them is the lone hero of our story, except in how they work together. The sum is so much greater than its parts.

All of that is America at its best, too—especially the part about there not being any lone hero. It takes all of us to make the world better, or even to keep the hard-fought ground we’ve won already. And when I say all of us, I truly mean all of us. (Well, maybe not the actual factual Nazis, because seriously fuck those guys.)

There’s a lot of scared and angry out there, but artists, writers, all of you? You know what to do. Don’t worry that it’s going to be too earnest or corny or uncool, because science backs me up on this one: Love is the answer. Show us what love looks like. Show us the better world we can grow to be.

* * *

Andrea Phillips is an author, game designer, and semi-retired transmedia pundit. She co-writes the serials ReMade and Bookburners for Serial Box. Her other work includes the SF thriller Revision, pirate romp The Daring Adventures of Captain Lucy Smokeheart, and the interactive children’s book Circus of Mirrors. You can find her on Twitter or at her blog, Deus Ex Machinatio.

ReMade is a serialized story from Serial Box. Told in 15 episodes, it is team-written by Matthew Cody, Carrie Harris, E. C. Myers, Andrea Phillips, Gwenda Bond, and Kiersten White. The first episode is free – read or listen to it at SerialBox.com or in the Serial Box app!

“Sharply told in a fantastic new format, ReMade should be on your radar.” 

–  James Dashner, #1 NYT Bestselling Author of The Maze Runner series