This week, the paperback of Invasive landed.

Presently, I am in a shed that has once again, in a timely fashion, become a staging ground for gigantic carpenter ants. I have two above my head right now. I had three above my head five minutes ago, but one literally dropped down onto my hand as I was typing an email.

So, I figure that makes a good flash fiction challenge.

The book is called Invasive.

The idea is, in part, about invasive species.

So, write about that. In whatever capacity you so choose. Take inspiration from it. Needn’t be sci-fi. What’s an invasive species look like in fantasy or horror? How could it figure into a crime or mystery story?

Length: ~1500 words

Due by: June 9th, Friday, noon EST

Post at your online space.

Drop a link in the comments below.

HEY, LOOK.

The ants go marching, now to paperback. Invasive is now out in mass market format, and it’s a book about ants, anxiety, the future, dangerous billionaires, one angry spider, and it also contains a free trip to Hawaii.*

* but the ants also get to go to Hawaii, sorry

If you’d rather a more official description:

On an isolated island in the middle of the Pacific, a team of scientists is employed by a charismatic billionaire hoping to change the world through cutting-edge research.

In a small cabin on a remote lake in the middle of the Adirondacks, FBI futurist Hannah Stander confronts a barely recognizable human body—one skinned alive by thousands of genetically engineered ants.

Hannah’s investigation ultimately leads her to Kohole Atoll. Though the team there vehemently denies any connection to the body, the more Hannah studies the group, the more she suspects their work has sinister applications. And the more it looks like no one is getting off the island alive.

Who said nice things about it? Lots of folks!

In a starred review, Kirkus said:

“Think Thomas Harris’ Will Graham and Clarice Starling rolled into one and pitched on the knife’s edge of a scenario that makes Jurassic Park look like a carnival ride.”

Publishers Weekly said:

“Fans of Michael Crichton will feel right at home.”

The Washington Post said:

“Wendig does an impeccable job blending fact and fiction as he describes invasive species and insects being used as biological weapons. This is a propulsive tale that also examines our interaction with — and ma­nipu­la­tion of — the natural world.”

The ants said:

“chitter swarm click clicky chitter swarm hey a dead bird let’s eat it”

You should to get it, because if nobody buys my books I die writhing in the abyss!

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

The book is also available in e-book format (Kobo, iTunes, Google Play, plus the links above), and audio (narrated by the impeccable Xe Sands). I’ll also have more Invasive news as the days go on — I’ll share when I have a green light to share.

Also, if you like it, please tell others, and leave a nice review somewhere.

Please enjoy.

I’m working on something now that’s three years in the making.

And when I say, “in the making,” I mean, “I’ve been making it inside my head.” Translation: a bunch of random ideas were invited to a random idea orgy, and for years they’ve been sticking bits into other bits and sloppily flopping around until eventually they don’t so much have a baby as they glom together and form a slippery, goopy Idea Voltron.

What I mean is, I’m working now on Exeunt.

Exeunt appeared as a collection of half-ass ideas in my head three years back, while taking a walk. And by the way, my judgment on ideas in general is this: ideas are mostly worthless. They’re dross. We like to imagine that all our ideas are pearls, but the reality is, I fear, most of them are fucking driveway gravel. They’re just hunks of broken limestone. But the secret there is: limestone is a building material. It forms the base of roads. It helps make up the recipe for concrete. And further, once in a while you find a piece of gravel that’s interesting to look at — it’s got a vein of quartz running through it, or it’s got a little mollusc fossil in there, or maybe it’s actually a goblin tooth and if you put that tooth under the pillow of an enemy they will lose all their teeth and you can laugh and laugh and laugh at your foes as they feebly gum their food.

Point is, ideas aren’t precious gems. They’re just stones.

But stones have value, too, in aggregate.

And over time, they build up, and the ideas you have keep tumbling around and around in your head. And maybe they polish up into something pretty, or maybe they start to form the karst and bedrock of something bigger, some structure, some story, some vital tale. That’s why when I get an idea, I don’t write it down. I let it go. If it’s a real idea, if it’s going to be the basis of something bigger, it will return. It’ll keep kicking around. It’ll get stuck in a shoe.

Exeunt was that. It kept coming back. Again and again.

Obsessively.

But I never knew what to do with it. It had a core, it had characters, but it didn’t have shape. It didn’t have a point. It was just this half-formed thing in the dark, gibbering and moaning.

I knew if I started it, it’d just be me struggling to slap that mewling glob into some kind of meaningful shape, like I was a bored kid kicking a can. It wouldn’t feel right because I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d tried this previously with other books: my novella, The Forever Endeavor, is literally based on an idea I had almost twenty years ago, and periodically over the years I had tried to dip my toes in it, write a chapter or two, and every time it felt like I was on a date with someone and we just weren’t connecting. Each of us making sad small-talk, staring down at our water-glasses, trying to find some spark, some reason to keep on keeping on. My book, Atlanta Burns, was three different things: it was a name (the titular “Atlanta Burns”), a thing about dog-fighting, and a thing about white supremacy in a small Pennsylvania town, and it wasn’t until one day that those three things collided randomly in my head and the book was born. My first book, Blackbirds, somewhat infamously took five years to write — and it took five years because I didn’t know what the sweet hot fuck I was doing with it.

I say all this as a lesson to you — but more as a reminder to myself! — that this shit takes time. Yes, some books appear like vengeful whole-bodied specters at the moment of creative inception, and you can sit down right after and exorcise the spirit right onto the page. But some books… *whistles* man, some books take weeks, months, even years to figure out. It’s like cooking. Sometimes it’s high-heat and a quick-fry and the dish is done. But other dishes are low and slow. The flavors take a long time to come together. A pot of chili tastes better the next day because all those ingredients need time to cool down and join forces. Some books are that way, too.

Sometimes, with a book, you spend more time thinking about it, ideating upon it, then you do actually writing the damn thing. Sometimes the story is as much about rejecting ideas and finding shape and direction as it is about actually putting it on the page. It’s a pot of water set to boil — slow to heat, miserable to watch, until the moment comes and it’s boiling over the edge.

The problem is, this doesn’t always feel like working.

It doesn’t feel like you’re doing anything.

And that’s okay.

You can set that pot on the back burner and let it simmer for a while.

But here’s the trick:

Don’t get complacent.

Don’t let that be the only thing.

And don’t let this be the excuse not to ever write it.

You get a book that’s taking a long time to bubble and froth, hey, okay. Work on something else. Something short, something long, something that’s ready. And that’s part of the trick: you’re never just silently working on one book. I think we all have lots of pots on lots of burners at various stages of potential deliciousness — some are still missing ingredients, but you should always have something ready to go.

And then when it’s time, you gotta do it. You have to stow away the fear — because the longer the book takes the simmer, the bigger and scarier it may loom in your mind, its shadow long and deep — and you have to sit down and do the damn thing. You can’t waffle. You can’t lean on this as a crutch. Just as you know the book needed its time to come together, you also have to know when it’s time to stop fucking around and fucking write the fucking thing. Problem is, you don’t have any reliable test for it. You can’t dip a hot copper wire in a petri dish of its blood. You can’t ask it. You can’t smell its ripeness like it’s a fucking pineapple. You just have to do it. Or, at least, try it. Sometimes a book needs you to wait. Sometimes the book needs you to write it. Best you can do is put pen to paper or fingers to keys and see what happens.

It’s what I’m doing now.

Fingers to keys.

Ideas stapled to the page to stop them from running.

Exeunt, coming soon.

Years in the making, an orgy-baby purged in a rough birth.

Wish me luck, and I wish you luck, too.

Go to this tweet.

That begins a series of Choose Your Own Adventure-style tweets (currently at this point, posted yesterday). I’ve been doing it since before the new year, though some of the early ones didn’t thread, but these do, so you should be able to look through the whole thing on a single web- or app-client.

I want you to go through those, and base some flash fiction off of any part of the completely deranged fantasy thread going on there. You can be faithful to it or stray wildly from it or build on the worldbuilding inanity, whatever you wanna do, do.

That’s it. Go write.

Length: ~1000 words

Due by: June 2nd, Friday, noon EST

Post at your online space.

Link back so we can all read.

Enjoy.

The stand-alone sequel to the IMMUNE series…

Thirteen years have passed since the Medusa plague wiped out nearly 99 percent of the world’s population and pushed humanity to the brink of extinction. 

Climate change triggered by nuclear skirmishes in the last fevered days of civilization decimated agriculture and livestock, and the hardened survivors battle for what few resources remain.

Rachel Fisher is one of the lucky ones. In her small community in Nebraska, she and her family have access to food, clean water, weapons, and medical care.

And her 11-year-old son Will is the only child known to have survived infancy since the plague.

But everything changes when someone comes looking for him.

* * *

Real quick. The Immune was about a man looking for his daughter during and in the immediate aftermath of a civilization-ending plague. The Living is the sequel, set 13 years later.

Anyway, here are the things I learned. Your mileage may vary.

It Can’t Be Book-1-in-A-Different-Location or Do You Really Need to Write a Sequel?

Writing more than one book in the same story universe requires a certain level of chutzpah. Whether it’s two books or a trilogy or seven-book-ology or a continuing mystery series, you’re telling the reader that it’s going to be worth their while to invest their free time in multiple books set in the same world with at least some of the same characters.

The Immune was inspired in part by Stephen King’s The Stand, one of the classics of post-apocalyptic fiction, and you don’t see a sequel to that sonofabitch in bookstores, do you? My favorite novel of all time is probably Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, also devoid of a sequel. Hell, even Stephen King admits that the Dark Tower books are really one long novel (and you’re not jumping into that story anywhere but with The Gunslinger).

Think of your five favorite books of all time. Are any of them sequels? Do any of them have sequels? Probably not. Be honest with yourself about whether the sequel needs to exist or if you’re just hiding from the scariness of moving onto a new fictional world. You need to be as committed to this story as you were to the first. In this case, I decided that I had a good enough story to tell, one that was not simply riding on the coattails of its predecessor, one that could stand on its own but also add some depth to the mythology laid out in the first book.

Book 2 Should Probably Stand On its Own

Books are a tough sell these days, and the last thing you want to do is limit your potential audience. I hadn’t planned on writing a sequel when I wrote the first book. When putting together the storyline for The Living, I wrestled with how dependent it would be on its predecessor. If you make it too dependent, only folks who read the first would be able to enjoy the second – that really limits your potential audience.

In the end, I wrote the story to stand alone, sprinkling in enough backstory so anyone could start with this book and not feel lost. Then I asked someone who hadn’t read The Immune to read it. When she told me she had no problems understanding the backstory, I knew I was in good shape. Now there are two doors to this fictional universe I created, and a reader can come into it however they like. For a relatively unknown writer like me, the last thing I want to do is make it harder for people to come to my books.

Now before you come at me with your sharpened pieces of avocado toast – I said Book 2 should probably stand alone. You may have a sweeping story arc that’s going to take three or seven or eight hundred books to resolve and a reader absolutely cannot start anywhere but with the first book. Great, fine, you do you.

For those interested in how the sausage was made – meaning how to do this and make sure you’ve put in just the right amount of backstory, this was a really helpful exercise: I went through the manuscript, plucked out every reference to things that happened in the first book and pasted those into a separate document. I ended up with a two-page synopsis of all the things someone would need to know from The Immune without having read it, and it showed me that I had parceled out the pieces of backstory at the best possible moment and in the right order.

Your Characters Have Changed a Lot Since Book 1

Of course, this is going to vary, depending on the story you’re telling and the time frame involved. Your sequel might pick up immediately after the conclusion of the first book or it might pick up six jillion years later. The Living is set 13 years after the events of the first book, and so my characters are all older and no longer the shell-shocked survivors who just witnessed the end of the world. They’ve moved onto living their best lives in this empty world – staying alive and trying to find meaning in a world they hadn’t prepared for.

But regardless of where your sequel falls on the timeline, your characters are not the same people they were at the beginning of the first book. Their lives have changed in fundamental – possibly terrible – ways, and you must be aware of that going into the sequel. I’m not the same person I was 13 years ago and I suspect you’re not either.

Writing a Sequel Is Harder Than You Think But It Is Also Very Comforting

You know how at Thanksgiving, at the beginning of the day, “this is gonna be great” and then by mid-afternoon, you’re like “I got left on the porch as an infant and my real mommy kills dragons and shit because no way am I related to these people” and then by nightfall everyone is full and happy and you’re all laughing over eating the rest of the Boston cream pie.

This is the best analogy I can come up with for writing a sequel. This is a familiar world, one you know really well – even if this story is set in a different corner of that world. You’re not creating characters out of whole cloth, and you have an understanding as to what makes them tick. And remember, without memorable characters, you’ve probably got a forgettable book.

That being said, it can wear on you a little. I’ve spent more than four years in the world of The Immune, and it’s been a lot of fun – mostly. And they mostly come at night. Mostly. BUT I DIGRESS. In some ways, the sequel was the harder book to write, but it was very rewarding to spend that much time with the same characters – those mother-effers are ALIVE (or you’re insane, one or the other). You find out new things about them that didn’t come up in the first book. If I’d passed on writing the sequel, I would have missed out on seeing the heroine in a whole new light, with years of experience and hardship under her belt.

Maybe This Should Have Been the Book You Wrote First and Not a Sequel At All

I’ve saved the hardest lesson for the end (and this is more directed to folks who want to sell a book to a traditional publisher, although it applies to self-publishers as well). I won’t lie, this was the most painful lesson, in part because I learned it too late. Although I’ve had decent success self-publishing, I have yet to sell a book to an American publisher. A Bulgarian publisher bought the rights to my very first book (a crime thriller) a couple years back and I have cool pictures of that book in bookstores around the Bulgarian capital. But a book in an American bookstore? It’s still on my bucket list.

My agent loved The Immune, and a number of editors had very nice things to say about it when we sent it out on submission. But in the end, it didn’t sell (I ultimately self-published it), and some of the feedback was that the as-it-happens end-of-the-world story had already been done, so there really wasn’t demand for another book in that vein.

I’ll never know, obviously, but I have a hunch that if I had written The Living first (and The Immune had never existed beyond that two-page backstory), it would have sold. I think it has enough interesting story elements that might have set it apart from other books in the genre. I’m not saying I re-invented the wheel of apocalyptic fiction here, but I do know the genre pretty well; I’m just saying that The Living might have stood out just enough to pull in an offer.

Don’t get me wrong – I loved writing The Immune, I was happy with how it turned out, and it’s sold a goodly number of copies. But the experience was also a lesson in story development. If you think of one story, there may be a better or more interesting one hiding just underneath. Perhaps I wasn’t an experienced enough writer then to think deeper than “I’ll write an apocalypse book now!” Now when I think up a story idea, I try to think of another story behind it, or even behind that one, one that might not be as readily apparent.

I am in no way trying to force you to write solely to the market or discouraging you from writing whatever your precious little heart desires. But you should also be trying to stretch yourself as a storyteller, challenge yourself, find stories that are just a little farther off the beaten path. This could be the difference between getting a book deal or not; if you’re self-publishing, this could be the difference between breaking free of the pack and your book getting lost in the shuffle.

* * *

David lives in Virginia. The Living is his third novel. He’s also the creator of a series of short animated films, including So You Want to Write a Novel, which have been viewed nearly 3 million times on YouTube and were featured in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Huffington Post.

David Kazzie: Website | Twitter

The Living: Amazon

*opens the cage*

*lets the news out of the cage*

*the news swiftly pounces on and devours a goat*

HEY LOOK

NEWS

That’s right, I’m writing the new Turok comic for Dynamite.

Art duties are by the incomparable Álvaro Sarraseca. Covers by him, Aaron Conley, Andy Belanger. With a backup story (Magnus!) by Aubrey Sitterson. Thanks to Matt Idelson and Matt Humphreys for having me onboard.

You may note this is very clearly not the same Turok you know (er, if you know Turok, that is) — though based on the original Gold Key property, this is a new take, with a new character. You may also know that I’m already writing Turok in the form of short backup stories contained in the issues of The Sovereigns. So, though Turok #1 comes out in August, you can start checking out his story now. So, go and do that. Or you’ll be eaten by a pack of starveling compsognathus.

Hope you check it out.

*dinosaur shriek*