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

Right now, for me — and maybe for you — making art is like oral surgery on a rabid bear.

It’s very difficult to just sit down, not look at the news, open a Word .doc, and start writing some cool shit. It feels, nnngh, somehow precious, too special, like you’re eating cake while the house burns. “Oh, I see we have zombies trying to break down the door,” you say. “This seems like an excellent time to watch Cinemax and masturbate.”

That’s how it feels.

And how it feels is wrong.

What I mean is this: if you’re a person who Makes Art, then that’s who you are, and there’s nothing precious or small about that. It’s not masturbation. Not even in times of crisis and duress. It matters because it’s who you are, it’s what you want, it’s what you do. Art is vital, and as such, the artist is vital for making it. Part of the goal of the chaos going on is to put a rope around your wrists, your throat, and your heart and try to stop you from making cool stuff. It’s designed to hamstring you creatively and critically. You can’t let that happen. You gotta carry on. You gotta do the work. YOU GOTTA MAKE THE THINGS.

Question is, how?

How do you persist? How do you create art in a time of unfolding fuckery?

I, as always, have thoughts.

1. It’s Okay If Your Output Slows

You don’t have to go warp-speed. You don’t have to create at the same level. It’s okay to be slower, to produce a little less, to create a little more methodically.

2. It’s Not Okay To Stop Entirely

You can take a break. But eventually, making art means making art. Writing requires writing, music means picking up the instrument, creating stuff means grabbing the tools even as it feels strange to do so. To do the thing you gotta do the thing. This is the hardest and simplest truth of making art. You have to do the work, even if it’s a little at a time.

3. The Tools Of Art Are Your Weapons

Art is how you fight back. It’s how you take ALL THIS NOISE inside your heart and FORCE IT OUT. The tools of the creator are conduits for expression — and it’s totally okay to express your rage, your bewilderment, your grief, your overall teeth-gritting and pants-shitting distress. Funnel it all into the work. Don’t be afraid of that. Don’t be afraid to bleed on the page and yell at the screen and metaphorically punch the work into shape. This is your barbaric yawp. Your tools can be your weapons. Your art can be your battlefield. This can be how you resist.

4. Art Can Also Be Your Escape

You also don’t have to do any of that shit. You don’t have to see your art as war, or your pen as a knife you want to stick in the imaginary neck of your enemies. Art can also be a window or a doorway. It can be a way out. Sometimes pop culture is called escapist, and that’s used as a criticism, but fuck all that in the ear. Nothing wrong with needing to escape from time to time. And there’s nothing wrong with being the one providing that escape. Not everything needs to be a mirror reflecting back the world, or a battleground on which we fight. Sometimes we just need a nice meal, or a hot bath, or a good goddamn book.

5. Shut It All Off For A While

Out there? The news? Social media? Life, in general? You can shut it off and shut it out. You can do this willfully or with the help of software like Freedom or Anti-Social. Sometimes media and social media feel like drinking poison. But that glass of poison? It’s in your hand. Put it down. Yes, we all need to be informed. Yes, we should endeavor to engage with the world. But not at the cost of what we want to do. Everything in moderation.

6. Consume Art Greedily In Great, Heaving Gulps

Up your art quota. Read more. Watch more. Go look at a fucking painting for an hour. Bathe in it, brine yourself in it, grow fat on the unctuousness of other people’s creativity. Then: think about it. Contemplate what you’re getting out of it. Behold the power of art as a generator of ideas, as a means of escape, as a tool of engagement and resistance. It’s long been true that if you want to make art, you need to also digest art. You don’t become a writer without already being a reader. So, go back to the well. Bring up fresh water to fill your canteen, man. Go read a book you loved and haven’t read in a while. And expand your horizons, too — look at creators who are making art beyond your current window of experience.

7. Remember Your Audience

Creating art isn’t just for you. It’s for them. I always say that the first draft is for me, but every subsequent draft is for you. People want what you have to to show them. So — show them.

8. Practice Self-Care

Some of this list is already about aspects of self-protection, true. But making art requires your brain and your heart and your soul to be relatively intact. They can have wounds and scars — we all do, and we probe those old injuries sometimes to do what we do. But they cannot be torn asunder, and if all of this is just breaking you into little pieces, find a way to put it all back together again. You know the things that give you solace. Friends. Loved ones. Ice cream. A Netflix binge. An oil drum full of schnapps. Softcore Cinemax porn. Whatever it is, go do it. Take the time to protect yourself. It’s armor you wear while you make cool stuff.

9. Make A Change

Sometimes, we need to jump-start our processes by changing them. If you write in the night, try the morning. If you paint in one medium, choose another. Modify the process or the output. Make a change big or small, see what happens. It’s like driving on a different road — sometimes the change of scenery matters.

10. You Matter, This Matters, You Can Do It

Trust me on this one. You can do it. You have to do it. It matters. Nobody can take that away from you. Making art is always, now and before, an act of defiance. So, defy. Resist. Nobody wants you to make art. You’ll always feel like an impostor. And in times like this, it will forever feel like a waste of time too precious to preserve. It’s not. Art is a throughline of human history. We’re all holding onto that rope and it helps pull us along — better yet, it helps those who come later understand what came before. So, grab the rope. Add your own knot. Pull yourself along and help others to do the same. You can do it. Let’s go.

Man, I want to go back to Maui. Just fuck off on a plane. Kick it around some sand. Drink some tiki drinks. Pretend the world has not gone bugshit batty.

Anyway.

Wee bits of news:

INVASIVE still on sale! Why? I assume a colony of ants got into the UNIVERSAL E-BOOK SERVERS and nibble-hacked it so to promote their PRO-ANT agenda. Whatever. Point is, you can still grab it for $2.99 at Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and iBooks. Please go grab it! Or spread the word. Or both. It’s a free trip to Hawaii, after all. Plus, there’s a praying mantis named Buffy. Also, here’s a pretty good review of the book. Takeaway excerpt:

‘There are elements of Invasive that remind me of Jurassic Park in particular but I soon came to the conclusion that this is no bad thing and I lapped it up. All of it. This is a thrilling novel of survival quite apart from the fascinating science behind these rather unpleasant critters and it becomes increasingly intense as the numbers of survivors dwindle one by one and the ants themselves look set on an escape to the mainland. The chaos and murder they wreak is horrifyingly chilling and lovingly described. A part of me wanted to look away but the rest of me couldn’t.

I loved the character of Hannah. She’s got the weight of the world on her shoulders, thanks to her parents, and this is dealt with brilliantly by Chuck Wendig. She has so much to fight against and she manages it even though it’s so hard. Agent Cooper has his own problems and it’s all the more telling that he has to rely on Hannah who really could do with some care herself. But despite, or because of, her problems, Hannah’s humour is something she relies upon and this is a novel full of witty, sharp dialogue. It really is such a pleasure to read.

If you read a novel about killer ants you want it to make your skin itch, your spine shudder and your pulse beat faster. Invasive achieved this perfectly. The whodunnit element is satisfyingly done and, chillingly, we go from one crisis to another, from one bloody death to another – I couldn’t turned these pages quickly enough. Fast, gory, horrific, clever, witty, disgusting, itchy – Invasive ticks all the techno thriller boxes while also managing to put me off ants quite considerably.’

Also, only a couple more days to get in on the AWKWARD AUTHOR PHOTO CONTEST. Do this now. We’ve even got a couple fancy-pants PROFESSIONAL AUTHORS taking part. Lotta entries so far. Great deal of fun. Snap your pic, send it to me, enjoy the mirth.

I think this is the first review of THUNDERBIRD out in the wild. It’s a bit spoilery, be advised. Takeaway quote:

‘Wendig returns to his signature anti-heroine with renewed vigor and delivers a knockout thrill-ride full of twists, scares, emotionally resonant moments, and a whole heap of action that also moves the plot forward. It oddly feels like the book that puts Miriam’s world most in line with the one we’re living in…’

And today I attack the second draft of the fifth Miriam book, THE RAPTOR & THE WREN.

So, wish me luck.

Oh and hey! HowStuffWorks has a video interview with me filmed at NYCC. I talk about writing and Star Wars and stuff. “Chuck Wendig Will Make You A Writer.”

And luck unto you on this most malevolent of Mondays.

Here are some pretty flowers.

Dearest Electors, And Also My Fellow Americans:

I don’t know if you’ve noticed lately, but things have gone slippery here in the ol’ States-That-Are-United. I feel like I’m watching one of those videos where a car hits a patch of ice in slow-motion and then drifts ineluctably down a hill toward an intersection, and we see it’s happening but we can’t do shit about it, just as the driver of that car couldn’t really do shit about it. Except this video is worse than any video I’ve seen, because the car is now sliding toward a school bus, and a church, and a zoo full of adorable animals, also a hospital, and at the end of it all is a nuclear munitions factory sitting on a fault line.

The news from President-Elect Trump’s side of the chasm comes fast and furious every day, and it’s never really good news. It veers somewhere between head-scratchingly odd and gut-churningly apocalyptic. It’s like watching TV in Bizarro-World. If I wrote this stuff in a novel, people would tell me it was too far-fetched for fiction. If I wrote it as satire, it’d be too on-the-nose, too crass, too clumsy. It’s all very confusing. We’re all very confused. We have a phrase amongst me and my fellow bewilderbeasts: this is not normal. But lately, that phrase has almost started to feel a bit toothless to me. We’ve set a benchmark for normal that includes George W. Bush’s run, because at this point I think we’d all gladly agree to another four years of him, instead. But normal is so small a signpost, and so far in our rearview. Abnormal isn’t even visible anymore from where we are. We’re in Fucking Cuckootown, Population All Of Us. We all live here now, it seems. The news is like being covered in fire ants. Each headline seems weirder and worse than the last. TRUMP ANNOUNCES MUMM-RA THE EVER-LIVING AS PICK TO HEAD SECRETARY OF STATE. MUMM-RA SAYS, “I’LL GET THOSE THUNDERCATS. ALSO I PLAN ON DISMANTLING CLIMATE CHANGE LAWS, WORKER PROTECTIONS, CIVIL RIGHTS, AND EACH YEAR INSTEAD OF PARDONING A TURKEY FOR THANKSGIVING WE WILL CATAPULT A BAG OF KITTENS INTO THE SUN. MOSTLY, THOUGH, IT’S THE THUNDERCATS THING. ANCIENT SPIRITS OF EVIL, TRANSFORM THIS DECAYING FORM!”

One of the aspects that is so far beyond normal to me is the fact that conservatives are… somehow on board with all of this. Listen, I get it, Trump ran on a platform of draining the swamp, and Crooked Hillary with her Evil Emails and also her Goldman-Sachs ties, and he was a Man for the People. But that hasn’t worked out. We aren’t even remotely heading in that direction. Trump is surrounding himself with the richest pay-for-play donors. (He’s also got a few generals up there in civilian roles, which is sounds a lot like a junta.) Trump is kissing-friends with Goldman-Sachs. Trump is bringing in people who have done a lot worse than Hillary in the email department. He’s not only failing to protect the American workers, but he’s glad to individually call them out on his Twitter feed like a vengeful god who is also somehow a poop-shellacked diaper-baby. And yet gods, that’s just the beginning of it.

He refuses to take intelligence briefings.

He’s surrounded himself with Nazi-Adjacents.

Kellyanne Conaway said he’ll stay on as a producer for The Apprentice, but then he gets on Twitter and rants about how CNN is “fake news” because that’s totally untrue, despite his own spokesperson saying it. (This is gaslighting, and please read Teen Vogue’s take on that.)

He provoked diplomatic conflict with China and India before he’s even in office.

He defended Duterte, who has idly suggested, oh, he wouldn’t mind slaughtering 3 million drug-users in his country because sure, that’s a thing you can do, and also, Duterte is a fan of Hitler ha ha ha oh shit.

Some of his people have signal boosted completely deluded ding-dong conspiracy theories about Democrat kid-toucher cabals operating out of secret Satanic pizza shops.

Pretty much every appointment he’s making are either people whose ethics place them as haters of the department they’re about to lead, or they’re just woeful incompetents who have no right to head their given department. I’m pretty sure for the EPA, Trump is going to appoint a guy spraying CFC hairspray into the air while dancing on a cairn of burning tires.

Like I said: Fucking Cuckootown.

Except — except! — somehow, we were not content with merely remaining in Fucking Cuckootown, oh no. No, no, no, no. We packed our bags and said, “I bet there’s something even wackier going on down the road,” and we all got in our cars and we headed on down to BATFUCK CITY, POPULATION EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE AND THIS IS FINE. Because now we are starting to see evidence that the state of our democracy is that it’s a finger puppet with a Russian middle finger up its ass. The wind has been whispering it for a while, and now we have intelligence agencies confirming it — not just that they intervened, but that they intervened on behalf of the candidate who won. (A candidate who “won,” by the way, by losing the popular vote and whose margin in battleground states was so thin you could slip it under a door.)

I just want you to take a moment with that.

Swish it around in your mouth.

Savor that for a while.

Surely some of you are fans of cinema. Maybe you like, oh, I dunno, The Hunt for Red October. Or you enjoy an Indiana Jones movie once in a while. Could be instead that you’re a student of history, or at least a fan of The History Channel, back before their version of ‘history’ was about UFO Sasquatches. And if you watched The History Channel, you probably remember, oh, mmm, I dunno, the Russians and the Germans were not positive role models on the world stage. Do we remember the Cold War? No, I know it wasn’t fun, but it was better than just handing over the keys to the American Experiment, wasn’t it?

Let’s enjoy a brief timeline:

Trump asks, back in July, in a press conference, if Russian hackers will find Hillary’s emails. (We remember Hillary’s emails, right? The ones we printed out and braided into a noose to hang her with?)

WikiLeaks hits Hillary, and only Hillary.

Hillary warns us in a debate that Trump is Putin’s “puppet.”

Comey gets one last dig in just before the election. THE EMAILS THE EMAILS OMG wait j/k.

This also times out with PizzaGate, which is created almost literally out of thin air.

Trump is elected.

After he’s elected, we learn that Trump’s team had contact with Russia.

We also learn that Giuliani was in contact with Comey.

And now, 17 intelligence agencies, led by the CIA, confirm that there was election meddling with the explicit goal to elect Trump — and it was Russia, or one-step removed from Russia. And funnily enough (ha ha ha *sob*), Trump on the same day announces that his potential secretary of state is Rex Tillerson, Exxon CEO who is also (ha ha ha *weep*) pals with Putin. For extra-credit, Trump sided with Russia and against the CIA in this report. I want you to crystallize that in your mind: a Republican president-elect just doubted the intelligence from the CIA to prop up Russia. This is a man who has no experience as a politician or a leader who routinely rejects intelligence briefings in order to say, nah, I don’t buy it, thanks.

This is not sensational. This is not fake news.

This is really happening. (Or, worse, has already happened.)

This deserves investigation, for one. I don’t care if it was the Girl Scouts who did it, it still demands a deeper look — especially because this is a foreign power who would benefit from us losing our power on the world stage. Consider the book, The Foundations of Geopolitics, by Alexander Dugin. Dugin, a Russian political scientist who is chummy with Putin and who influences policy at a high level, wrote about a return to Russian power. In regards to the US:

‘Russia should use its special forces within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism. For instance, provoke “Afro-American racists”. Russia should “introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics.’

(For extra-chilling reading, check out what happens to Russian foes. Hint: it involves being discredited with planted child pornography. Whispers of PizzaGate, or worse. Is this what will happen to Trump’s foes?)

(And hey, what did Dugin say after Trump was elected? Oh, here it is: “Washington is ours.”)

That’s not —

Whh.

Fhhh.

Guh.

I mean, shit. Fuck. Shitfuck.

That’s not good, people.

You get the sense that, if we’re not careful, we’re all going to end up as butt-puppets.

Now, let’s ask:

What can we all do?

Well, for those of us who are not electors, we can write to our representatives. Our local representatives are best, as Emily Ellsworth has noted on Twitter. I would argue we should ask they continue to investigate Russia’s presence in our election, and further, demand an audit of the election. We should know what has transpired.

If you’re an elector —

It’s time for a hard discussion.

You have a job and arguably that job is to vote for the person who won the election.

Now, of course, that’s a bit wibbly-wobbly, isn’t it? Because one candidate gained nearly three million votes more than the guy we’re about to put into the Oval Office. But even there, I understand your job as the electoral college is separate from the popular vote. I also understand that maybe, once upon a time, you thought Trump was the Right Guy. He made promises. Drain the swamp. Get rid of crooked crony government. Big talk. None of it looks true, though, does it? He’s betrayed the promises. He’s not even in the chair and he’s failed us in innumerable ways.

And then there’s the Russia thing.

Listen, there’s maybe a part of you that says, hey, I don’t want another Cold War. And maybe these Russian hackers, maybe they exposed some truth on our behalf and we should just shrug and look the other way.

A few problems with that though, my dear elector.

First, if it can happen to them, it can happen to you. Meaning, if External Forces decide in a future election that your party is the problematic one, they’ll hack it the other way. The GOP has traditionally been hard-lined toward Russia — it is not outside the realm of possibility that they will sow discord in the other direction.

Second, considering everything I said earlier, it might be worth realizing that Russia is not a benevolent player. Sure, we don’t want another Cold War. Nobody wants a war of any kind. But if that war is coming to our doorstep, then it behooves us to not… just open the door, right? If a guy with a gun is at our door, we don’t let him in because we don’t want damage done to the door.

Third, if we allow this to stand, then the American Experiment as we know it is over, at least for a while. We will have ceded our power on the global stage. We will be a puppy showing its belly to the wolf standing above us.

(If you need an example of a principled conservative standing up against this on the daily, look no further than the Twitter feed of Evan McMullin.)

Put succinctly, we are in trouble.

Which is where you come in.

Let’s re-frame these political shitnanigans as what they’ve become:

A reality show.

Our PEOTUS is a reality show host.

It has routinely attracted our eyes in a lurid, reality-show way.

Trump used to host The Apprentice, created in part with Mark Burnett, but let’s instead look to another of Burnett’s shows: let’s look at Survivor.

I watch Survivor, and the big thing of the show these days is when all the survivors go to tribal council, and they vote out someone who wasn’t expecting it. The show puts up a hashtag: #blindside. Because that’s what it is. Some survivor who felt supremely comfortable in how they were controlling the game is suddenly sent packing when the rest of the tribe revolts privately against them. This happened, arguably, to Clinton — and some part of the electorate cheered. But now, we’ve gone the other way. The swamp was only drained so we could harvest the swamp monsters that had been slumbering in the bottom muck. So let’s do it again. Let’s blindside. It’s entertaining! It’s fun! And you can do it, electors. It’s on you. You can make the vote. You can change history. You can deliver the greatest blindside that the American Reality Show will have ever seen. Vote Trump off the island. If you can, some of you also need to vote for Clinton (I know, I know, her emails!) to get her to 270 electoral college votes.

This is, I get it, the Hail Maryest of the Hail Marys.

It’s unlikely.

And I don’t know what happens if it happens.

But we’ve already got one.

And maybe more of you are waiting in the wings.

Let’s not give up the American Experiment just yet.

Let’s embrace the democracy you still have as electors.

Let’s blindside the hell out of our Comrade-in-Chief.

“You ask for miracles? I give you, the electoral college.“

Mabily “Mab” Jones’ life has returned to normal. Or as normal as life can be for a changeling, who also happens to be a private detective working her first independent case, and dating a half-fey.

But then a summons to return to the fairy world arrives in the form of a knife on her pillow. And in the process of investigating her case, Mab discovers the fairies are stealing joy-producing chemicals directly from the minds of humans in order to manufacture their magic Elixir, the dwindling source of their powers. Worst of all, Mab’s boyfriend Obadiah vows to abstain from Elixir, believing the benefits are not worth the cost in human suffering—even though he knows fairies can’t long survive without their magic.

Mab soon realizes she has no choice but to answer the summons and return to the Vale. But the deeper she is drawn into the machinations of the realm, the more she becomes ensnared by promises she made in the past. And in trying to do the right thing, Mab will face her most devastating betrayal yet, one that threatens everything and everyone she holds most dear.

SEQUELS DON’T HAVE TO SUCK

It is a truth universally acknowledged that movie sequels are (almost) always dreadful, yet that isn’t necessarily true of second books in a series. Perhaps what dooms most film follow-ups is that they try to stay within the well-worn tracks of the beloved original; when they succeed, it’s often because they go darker. The same is true for book sequels.

If the first book is too gratuitously grim however, it leaves the series nowhere to go, no way to up the emotional ante. Luckily, ELIXIR, the first book in my CHANGELING P.I. series, is notably less dark than what’s fashionable for urban fantasy. While it deals with serious and disturbing subject matter there’s an underlying optimism; it’s a “cozy urban fantasy” as one reviewer put it. Thus, the second book, UNVEILED, gave me a lot of room to go psychologically darker, while still maintaining that sense of hope. So much of a first book is taken up in world-building, introducing characters, and laying a strong foundation for the series that follows. With some of that heavy-lifting already done, I was now free to really focus on the internal development of my characters, forcing them to grow as people. I’d always heard that writing a sequel was hard, so much harder than writing a first book, and I had braced myself for the difficulty of this task. What no one told me is that writing a sequel can also be really fun. Maybe I’m a sadist, but I relished the freedom a second book gave me to really push my characters to the point of breaking them, to find out who they become when they experience more than they think they can bear.

TASKS EXPAND OR CONTRACT TO FIT THE TIME AVAILABLE

Because ELIXIR was my first book, I didn’t write it under a deadline. I could take my sweet time to work on the story, waste hundreds of pages on tangent plot lines that went nowhere, stop and start as inspiration ebbed and flowed, and revise indefinitely. All told, I spent almost seven years on that first book. And then the publishing gods smiled on me and I found myself with a two-book contract which allowed me a little over seven months to write the follow-up, UNVEILED. Given my writing history, this task sounded almost impossibly daunting. What I realized, however, as I successfully completed the manuscript well within the deadline, is that tasks expand or contract to fill the time available. I took seven years to write ELIXIR because I could. I wrote UNVEILED in seven months because I had to. More time does not necessarily make for a better book, either. When there was all the time in the world, that time was most often unproductively frittered, whereas the deadline had a way of sharpening my focus, making me more attentive. And attention begets inspiration.

THE OUTLINE CAN MAKE YOU FREE

In order to meet my first deadline, I had to break down the mammoth task of producing a manuscript into small, manageable chunks. This meant learning to outline. Not because I thought outlined stories were inherently better, but because outlines are a time-management tool, and adulthood no longer gave me the luxury of last-minute all-nighters. Yet at the same time as I saw the need for an outline, I was afraid of it. I had “pantsed” my first manuscript, and even when I became more of a plotter, it was an amorphous, at-least-I-know-the-ending sort of plotting, not a minute chapter by chapter plan.

I thought outlining would crimp my creativity. Instead, it saved my sanity. Nothing can cause writer’s block like the panic of not knowing where your story is going, or realizing you’ve pantsed your way into an enormous plot hole. My detailed outline gave me a time, a place, and a cast of characters for each scene – but beyond that point I was free. It enabled me to focus in on the moment, explore the nuances of the setting, and– because I wasn’t worried about what was going to happen— really let each conversation shine. It turns out my muses work best when given a bit of a structure.

THE EDITOR IS ALWAYS RIGHT

The first professional writer I ever got to know personally was a 60-something, veteran journalist, a larger than life character to whom the phrase “tough old broad” seemed both complementary and apt. I was a wide-eyed recent college grad who’d been lucky enough to get to house-sit the apartment next to hers in a renovated tenement on New York’s Lower East Side. At that time, it never occurred to me to even dream of writing novels. I had set my heart on freelance journalism, and it was through my neighbor’s generous networking that I had my first article published. I also got my first experience of being professionally edited, and it was not pleasant to watch my most beloved paragraphs be summarily plucked from the piece. There was one change I was particularly unhappy about. I asked my neighbor if I had the right to refuse the editor’s request? I’ll never forget what she said to me, in her gravelly Long Island accent: “I’m going to give you the best advice you’ll ever get in your career as a writer.” “What?” I asked, rapt and eager to hear this wisdom. She leaned in, as if whispering a secret: “the editor is always right.”

I was disappointed to hear this, but I followed her advice. I saved my original draft, and kept it alongside the clipping of the piece when it was printed in the newspaper. When I read them both ten years later, I could only smile to myself and shake my head. That paragraph that I’d thought was so eloquent at the time? Turns out it was merely over-wrought. The editor’s changes had simplified it, made the story shine through without being bogged down by bombastic prose. In short, the editor had been *ahem* right.

I recalled this memory as I did revisions for UNVEILED with my wonderful editor at the time, Rebecca Lucash, who proposed a few changes that pained me to accept. I must confess I doubted her judgement at times, and clung tenaciously to my creation as it was, but in the end I realized that this person was a brilliant professional whose instincts I should trust. I can’t tell you what the change was without revealing a huge spoiler, but when I look back on UNVEILED now with the perspective of time, I must admit the advice of my old journalist friend still holds true. We as authors are often very poor evaluators of what’s working or not working in our own books; we’re just too close to it. I’m sure there are exceptions to the editor being right…but I haven’t found one yet.

YOU GET TO BE A LOCAL INSTEAD OF A TOURIST IN YOUR “WORLD”

One of my favorite parts of writing the CHANGELING P.I. series has been getting to make New York City into a magical place – because, in my experience of my adopted hometown, the real city is stranger than any fictional version. New York is its own character in this series, with all the quirks and flaws of any of the other characters. Since the first book was an introduction to this world, I had to take a tourist’s eye-view, as if I was introducing readers to the real city as well as my take on it. ELIXIR gleefully riffs on classic New York landmarks – for example making the Times Square New Year’s Eve ball drop into a portal to fairyland, with the focused attention of millions of people unwittingly powering the spell. But with most of the quintessentially New York places already touched upon in the first book, UNVEILED allowed me take the reader farther afield, beyond the boroughs and into both the glamorous and the gritty Tri-State commuter towns, the areas that tourists never see, the areas that frankly seem the least enchanted. But I set out to change that (perhaps because I’d moved out of the city and into the suburbia over the course of writing this series, and I was determined to find the magic here.) And plenty of weird, unexpected, magical things exist in the New York suburbs amidst the split levels and the strip malls, but you have to look harder to find them. The more mundane my settings, the harder I had to work as a writer to make them feel magical, and I think that challenge made me a better writer. Because a too-magical world is like a too-powerful character – boring. And while I admire the epic fantasy writer’s craft of made-from-scratch universes, personally, I’d rather believe that fairyland is no farther away than my own backyard.

* * *

Ruth Vincent spent a nomadic childhood moving across the USA, culminating in a hop across the pond to attend Oxford. But wherever she wanders, she remains ensconced within the fairy ring of her imagination. Ruth recently traded the gritty urban fantasy of NYC for the pastoral suburbs of Long Island, where she resides with her roguishly clever husband and a cockatoo who thinks she’s a dog. Ruth Vincent is the author of the CHANGELING P.I series with Harper Voyager Impulse, beginning with her debut novel, ELIXIR. Ruth loves to hear from readers.

Ruth Vincent: Website | Twitter

Unveiled: Amazon | B&N | Google Play | iBooks

Last night, B-Dub came into the living room where we are ensconced, and he said, somewhat poutily, “I want a new stuffed animal.”

Our response, practically canned at this point, was: “Christmas is coming up soon, and also, you just got like, 300 stuffed animals in Hawaii. And, you have so many stuffed animals at this point that we took away your bed so we could and we replace it with a giant sack stuffed with stuffed animals. You’re good. Relax.”

He became more indignant, then. Generally, he’s tantrum-averse these days, but he still gets grumpy, as any five-year-old is wont to do. And he asserted, with a stomp of his foot, “I want a new stuffed animal.”

So began the classic parental speech of, blah blah blah, if you can’t appreciate the things you have, why would we get you new things and also perhaps you don’t want the things you already have, blah blah blah.

Panicked, he said, “So, I’m not getting any stuffed animals for Christmas?!”

“We don’t know,” we said, shrugging. “We’ll see.”

(Another popular parental phrase: We’ll see. It’s the two-word equivalent of kicking the can down the road so you don’t have to deal with the can right now.)

His little face screwed up tight, not with grief but with a special kind of mischievous anger, and he said, quite confidently: “If you take my Christmas presents away, I’m taking your Christmas presents away.” (Here, echoes of my own father on the phone with the power company. They had him overdue on a bill, which was not his way. He said he paid it. They said he didn’t. The power company told him they’d turn his power off, and his response was: “If you turn my power off, I’ll turn your power off.” A nearly impossible threat, and probably unwise. But it worked.)

Anyway, we laughed. He wondered why we were laughing, and we said:

“We already had our Christmas presents. Our trip to Hawaii was our present to us.”

This boggled him for about three seconds, obviously stymying his plans.

But then, a new plan stirred.

“I will take Hawaii out of your head,” he said.

“What?” we asked, uncertain what we just heard.

“I will take the memories of Hawaii away from you.”

Wh

uh

ah

Holy shit, what the actual fuck? That was an astonishing threat. That he actually said. We kind of warily acquiesced, ha ha, okay, and then he promptly went to his drawing table (where he draws pictures nigh-endlessly), and he began to draw for about fifteen minutes.

After those minutes had passed, he delicately tore something out of a piece of paper with pinching fingers, then signaled for our attention. We looked over, and he stood there with a piece of paper hanging above his head. On this piece of paper was a ghost. (More a Pac-Man style ghost in design, if you need the visual.) B-Dub held it above him, then he dramatically fake died and fell to the ground. With fluttering hand, he helped the the paper ghost arise from his supine body.

B-Dub said, the paper fluttering, “I AM NOW GHOST ME.”

And “ghost him” proceeded to go grab a couple more pieces of paper. The cut-out-ghost brought us these pieces of paper, which were drawings that clearly illustrated the ghost hovering over two people (the words Mommy and Daddy written over these two people), and around ‘Mommy’ and ‘Daddy’ were images of palm trees and the ocean and other Hawaiian icons. Those icons were all pointing, via arrow, toward the ghost. Then — then! — in the next image, the ghost exploded those things with fireballs. “GHOST ME IS IN YOUR HEAD, STEALING YOUR MEMORIES,” B-dub explained. “THEN I EXPLODE THEM WITH FIRE.”

I was impressed, and said so. He was having fun drawing it. He was channeling his art into this… well, this terrifying act of him somehow turning into a ghost that is able to get into our heads and steal our memories in order to burn them up, but I mean, what can I say? I loved it. He seemed happy and content, and was no longer angry, and now Mommy and Daddy have precious art we can hang on our fridge of our memories being stolen and burned by an angry ghost child.

Kids are fucking weird.

And I love it.