Trapped by his Maker’s command to protect a mysterious box, Adem is forced to kill anyone who tries to steal it. When a young boy chances upon Adem’s temple, he resists temptation, intriguing the golem. As the boy and his sister convince Adem to leave the refuge of his temple, the group lands in a web of trouble.

Now Adem will do whatever necessary to keep his new young charges safe, even if it means risking all to get rid of the box. Their saving grace comes in the form of an angel who offers to set Adem free of the box’s magic by granting his greatest desire—making him human. But first, Adem must bring back the angel’s long-dead human love from the Underworld. 

* * *

Say yes. (And no.)

As a newbie author trying to get your start, say yes to as many opportunities as you (reasonably) can. Over the past several years while writing Mud, I’ve taken writing classes that turned into an amazing writer critique/support group, contributed guest posts for writing blogs, and helped out other writers online.

And ta-da—it sounds like common sense in retrospect, but it’s blown my mind to discover that now, these contacts have turned into people I have relationships with, and they’re all happy to help me spread the word about my book.

For advanced yes-sayers, the next step is to learn when to say no, too—protect the time you need to write and do your best at the opportunities you’re lucky enough to have already.

Touch your book every day.

Not literally. That’s weird. Stop it.

But really—do something to further your manuscript every single day. Writing a book is hot mess. There’s a lot of moving pieces of character development, plot arcs, worldbuilding, and more, all swooshing around and mixing together in half-developed blobs.

While writing Mud, I learned that it only took a couple days of missed writing time to totally lose my momentum. But when I touched it every day, even if it was just five minutes of jotting down notes on a loose scrap of paper, it kept my head in the game.

Edits: NOT the worst.

Every time I got into a round of edits, whether it be self-editing, feedback from my critique group, or notes from my editor, my first instinct was to put it off. It gave me that dark looming icky feeling, like a Dementor had just entered the room.

But then I’d bite the bullet and dive in, because it was inevitable and because I was just too busy for that procrastination shit. And you know what? It was never actually that bad. Smart feedback can even be a creative catalyst for new, better ideas.

It was never, not once, the miserable experience I expected it to be.

Not all edits are equal.

I have been incredibly lucky as a writer, in that many people were willing to take the time to give me thoughtful feedback on my novel.

But when many different people give you feedback, their opinions sometimes directly contradict each other. And even when they don’t contradict, not all of those outside opinions are right for you. It’s one thing to give each critic’s feedback respect and consideration. It’s a completely different thing to blindly follow every line of that feedback to a T.

As the writer, it’s your responsibility to determine what edits are right for your book … and which ones are not.

Support everyone around you the way you want to be supported.

I knew I’d need to rely on my family, friends, and extended network to help promote my book. But I’m finding that some of the close friends I thought were given advocates are really not, while others I’d never have expected to care at all are more excited than I’d expect my own mother to be, and are going out of their way to help me any way they can. It’s a truly amazing, humbling thing to see how excited people can get for some little thing I created.

The lesson I’m taking from this is that everyone else deserves that kind of support from me, too, when thier time comes. In fact, I wish I’d been going the extra mile for some of these people for years. I’ve lived, I’ve learned, and now I’ll do better.

* * *

E. J. Wenstrom is a fantasy and science fiction author living in Cape Canaveral, FL. When she’s not writing fiction, E. J. drinks coffee, runs, and has long conversations with her dog. Ray Bradbury is her hero.

E. J. Wenstrom: Website | Twitter | Facebook | Pinterest 

Mud: City Owl Press | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Goodreads

I wrote a comic.

I mean, it’s not my first comic, really, but it is the first one where I don’t have the authorial support of fellow penmonkey Adam Christopher — who, quite honestly, is a whole lot better at this thing than I am. Hyperion #1 is my first foray into writing a comic all by my lonesome.

So, obviously, my great hope is that you go out and pick it up.

And then pay money for it.

And then rub it all over your body and take pictures.

…

I mean, “read it.”

Comics are a different animal for me — they’re some strange combination of television show and the novel. They possess the visual, episodic component of television. But they also possess an internal dimension and a POV like novels. It’s that, but it’s also not that, because snapshotting the perfect images to accompany the story is a special gift all its own, as is making sure those images are perfectly well-compressed in 20-ish pages with a proper hook out of the issue. It’s tricky business. I have no idea what I’m doing.

But, I’m figuring it out. Slowly! The good news is, the team behind the book is so great, they are very clearly propping me up and making me look not terrible. Nik Virella’s art floors me every time I get it in my inbox, and then you add colors by Romulo Fajardo, Jr. and it’s like, holy shithell. And Emanuela Lupacchino’s cover? Plus all the great editorial support from Katie Kubert, Alanna Smith, and Christina Harrington? I’m a lucky ducky.

Thanks too to folks like Jim Zub and Gail Simone and Ron Marz and people whose online presence is often chockablock with great comics-writing chatter and advice.

Go forth and procure cool comics.

You can nab Hyperion at your local comic book store, or at Comixology.

Other cool comics out today: Hellcat, Mirror, Cry Havoc. What else? What comics are you reading and digging these days, folks? Drop in the comments and gimme 20.

I’m slowly, slooooowly crawling out of the spongy lung-slurry and finding my way to the light. I’m back at the desk today doing some work (yesterday I worked from bed on the iPad — WORD on the iPad is surprisingly robust, by the way), and I thought, well, hell, I’ll go say hi at the blog with a macro photo.

That there is a simple enough object: a stack of LEGO squares. Looks like LEGO DNA.

What’s the health scoop? Well. I’m here dealing with not just pre-pneumonia, as was reported last week, but rather: both flu and pneumonia at one time, which is to say, FLUMONIA. (My new authorial pseudonym will be Flumonia Lungbees. I will use this new name to check into hotels and it will also be my Tinder handle. Don’t tell my wife.) I was coughing up blood, but my lung X-Rays say that’s fine, believe it or not. And the antibiotics have run me ragged. But I’ve got deadlines that will eat me if I do not appease them, so here I be.

Sad to see the nightmare unfolding in Brussels. I’d love it if we could all keep a cool head about it and wait for details to come in and not resort to vilifying Muslims or refugees and I sure hope that we don’t let Trump say anything, anything at all, oh, too late, never mind. We should really all come together as a country and disavow him. I’d say that white people should also disavow him, but he’s clearly one of Boehner’s own Orange People. Probably not even human.

Whatever.

Be well, Belgium. And Europe. And refugees. And everybody.

P.S. tomorrow Hyperion comes out so I might pop by to remind you.

P.P.S. *coughs on you*

The word pneuma means one’s vital soul, one’s spark — a creative spirit.

The word pneumonia probably then means some kind of goblin that attaches to your lung meat and drains you of your creative spirit and spark. I’m pretty sure it’s Latin. Shut up.

Anyway, so, this last weekend I went to the Tucson Festival of Books — which is really such a stellar festival, expertly run with a volunteer army that operates flawlessly — and on the last day, when traveling home, I started to feel…

Well, not so hot.

Feverish, achy, all that good stuff.

Got home and had a pretty rocking fever, and the next day I went to the doc. Flu has spiked hard in our area, and apparently all over, and so I worried that’s what it was. He said usually flu knocks you flat, makes you feel like you’re hit by a truck. His fear, instead, was that my pneumonia from December had returned. Once you get pneumonia, you can be pretty susceptible to it going forward. And that’s the diagnosis — that I have pre-pneumonia, or walking pneumonia. Which means it is developing, I guess? I still get that crispy campfire lung-crackle when I breathe, which is exactly what I felt last time I had this totally charming illness. Ugh.

Anyway, last time I was out of commission in whole or in part for a month — from Thanksgiving to Christmas. This time, I’m hoping because we got ahead of it and I started antibiotics early that maybe I can cut this thing off at the knees.

Just the same, it means blogging will be light for the next week or so.

And it puts my travel next week to Denver for AnomalyCon in question. The doc doesn’t feel that traveling right now is necessarily the hottest idea, and that it could foster the illness to take stronger hold. Huge apologies to anyone who was hoping to see me next week, but I don’t think it’ll be in the cards. And apologies too to AnomalyCon, which by all reports is a stellar convention.

So, if you’re looking for something from me in the next week or so — ennnnh, I’d maybe expect a delay in that. I will try to ramp up back to work fast as I can muster.

This challenge is, as many of them are, both simple and complex, both easy and difficult.

I want you to write a story in five sentences.

No more than 100 words.

You can view it, if you’d like, as:

Sentence 1: Beginning / Inciting Incident

Sentence 2: Middle

Sentence 3: Middle peak, act turn or pivot

Sentence 4: Climactic turn or twist

Sentence 5: Resolution

That is not a strict map, but rather, a reminder that a story is a story, not a snapshot: it has a beginning, a middle and an end.

You can post it below in the comments if you’d like, or if you’d prefer to post at your blog and offer a link back, that’s fine, too.

Please, only one story. Do not spam the comments with a ton of these.

Just one.

So, make it count.

Due by next Friday, the 18th, at noon EST.

A mysterious worldwide epidemic reduces the birthrate of female infants from 50 percent to less than 1 percent. Medical science and governments around the world scramble in an effort to solve the problem, but twenty-five years later there is no cure, and an entire generation grows up with a population of fewer than a thousand women.

Zoey and some of the surviving young women are housed in a scientific research compound dedicated to determining the cause. For two decades, she’s been isolated from her family, treated as a test subject, and locked away—told only that the virus has wiped out the rest of the world’s population.

Captivity is the only life Zoey has ever known, and escaping her heavily armed captors is no easy task, but she’s determined to leave before she is subjected to the next round of tests…a program that no other woman has ever returned from. Even if she’s successful, Zoey has no idea what she’ll encounter in the strange new world beyond the facility’s walls. Winning her freedom will take brutality she never imagined she possessed, as well as all her strength and cunning—but Zoey is ready for war.

Don’t be afraid to tell a big story.

Ideas come in all shapes and sizes. Some start as a small niggling thought or a single character that continues to whisper in your ear no matter the time of day or night, while others suddenly block out the sun with their enormity, and that can be absolutely terrifying. Mostly because the larger the story the more risks a writer has to take. Many times there are more characters, more plot twists, global implications/fallout, and countless other factors that match the scale of the idea as it grows. I know when I first had the idea for The Last Girl it was thrilling but extremely daunting. Was I ready to tell this large of a tale? Could I execute it properly? Insecurity is the jacket a writer dons when they take up the craft, and I don’t think any of us ever removes it until we’ve typed the last sentence we’ll ever write, but the thing to remember is no matter how large the scope of the idea, you create it just like any other story; with one word after the next. Treat an enormous story as you would any narrative, keep a finger on the pulse of the big picture, but when you’re writing, narrow your gaze to the scene and make it the very best you can. In the end it will all come together.

Writing a novel is like cooking.

I know this analogy’s been made before but it’s definitely true, and it’s never been so apparent to me as while writing the first book in a trilogy. Balancing characters and overarching storylines that stretch all the way from the first book to the third is like creating just the right amount of spice in a meal. Too much and it’s overwhelming, too little, it’s bland. Heat up the plot too fast and it burns on the outsides while it’s soggy in the middle. Your subplots are your sides, complementing the main dish while adding their own texture and flavor to the overall experience. And just like any good meal there is always a recipe for a story, but I’ve found adding your own flare and special ingredient can make all the difference in the world. In other words, don’t be afraid to experiment here and there, you might be surprised with the end result.

Sometimes telling your story is a great way to discover new details.

My wife is amazing. Number one she agreed to marry me. Number two she’s willing to listen to me go on and on about the story I’m writing, giving little suggestions and input along the way as I ramble. It’s become a habit in our household that after my day of writing my wife reads the chapter/chapters completed, then we discuss where the story’s headed. This has been crucial for me. Not that I don’t know where the novel is going, but for the fact that by discussing the characters and their actions and what will eventually transpire, new light is shone upon the narrative. Little details snap into place like lock tumblers. Time and time again I’ve been energized and elated after talking about what’s next in the book and have made notes for nuances that I may not have thought of without telling the story aloud. I think this might go all the way back to where storytelling came from, because it truly originated as a spoken art before it was ever translated onto a cave wall, paper, and eventually computer screens.

The human species as a whole is quite delicate.

Genetics is a mind-blowing subject. The subtle and precise process on the genetic level that occurs for life to flourish in a healthy way astounds me. I did a lot of research for The Last Girl, and even though I didn’t delve into the real hard science in the first book, it was still a necessity for more answers to be revealed in the second and so forth. As a species our survival not only depends on food, water, clothing, shelter, and love, it also hinges on whether or not everything goes according to plan at the very first days of our lives or even before that. The delicacy of biological pathways, gene expression, and chromosomes in general was frightening to learn about in the sense of scale. At that level a misplaced gene could be absolutely catastrophic for the individual. One only has to look at the reports coming in about the Zika virus to see the implications of genetics being affected in the early stages of life. On the scientific front, leaps and bounds that have been made in the last few decades are unprecedented and have benefited millions, but at the same point the fact that editing a genome would change the human germline through inheritance is a potentially frightening scenario to say the least.

You’re not going to please everyone.

This is a universal truth, and attempting to do so will cause you an endless amount of grief. We are entertainers, artisans of words. We build worlds and destroy them on a daily basis. We create love, hate, joy, and sorrow with the tips of our fingers. If you love writing and are willing to put in the long hours laboring over your novel, willing to endlessly rewrite a chapter until it flows perfectly, willing to put your work out in front of the entire world to be judged, then you have to accept that there will be people who won’t like what you’ve created. It might be timing, or perhaps they don’t enjoy your style of storytelling, or maybe they want the story to be something different than it is. This is okay. It’s okay because if you love your work enough to make it the very best it can be, someone else will love it too, and they won’t be the only ones.

* * *

Joe Hart was born and raised in northern Minnesota. Having dedicated himself to writing horror and thriller fiction since the age of nine, he is now the author of eight novels that include The River Is Dark, Lineage, and EverFall. The Last Girl is the first installment in the highly anticipated Dominion Trilogy and once again showcases Hart’s knack for creating breathtaking futuristic thrillers. When not writing, he enjoys reading, exercising, exploring the great outdoors, and watching movies with his family.

Joe Hart: Blog | Twitter

The Last Girl: Amazon | Goodreads