It’s not unusual to work two jobs in this day and age, but sorcerer and former triad soldier Rupert Wong’s life is more complicated than most. By day, he makes human hors d’oeuvres for a dynasty of ghouls; by night, he pushes pencils for the Ten Chinese Hells. Of course, it never seems to be enough to buy him a new car—or his restless, flesh-eating-ghost girlfriend passage from the reincarnation cycle—until opportunity comes smashing through his window.

In Kuala Lumpur, where deities from a handful of major faiths tip-toe around each other and damned souls number in the millions, it’s important to tread carefully. Now the Dragon King of the South wants to throw Rupert right in it. The ocean god’s daughter and her once-mortal husband have been murdered, leaving a single clue: bloodied feathers from the Greek furies. It’s a clue that could start a war between pantheons, and Rupert’s stuck in the middle. Success promises wealth, power and freedom, and failure… doesn’t.

1. You Don’t Always Have To Listen To People Who Know Better

I almost didn’t write this novella. When Abaddon Books opened their call for submissions, I had a number of people gently suggest that I shouldn’t bother. It sounds malevolent and destructive, I know, but it came from a good place. I’m a pathological workaholic. I spend at least 12 hours a day voluntarily toiling at something. I’ve always worked two jobs, or had too many deadlines stacked over each other — not because I needed the money, but because it was a compulsion. But that’s another story.

So, anyway, these people told me no, and I told myself yes. I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote. I polished it as much as I could and sent it to even more people, who then replied, “This isn’t very pulpy. Maybe, you should think about this again.”. Rupert Wong is like Rincewind smooshed together with Constantine. He doesn’t want to be heroic. He doesn’t want glory. He’d really, really rather be boring and stable and alive. Rupert’s world — the Gods & Monsters universe that Chuck built — is pulpy, but he’s a side character jammed into the spotlight.

But I liked Rupert. I liked the fact he was a bit player come to the forefront. I liked his neuroses. I liked the fact he was a great cook and a bit of a coward and a loving partner, who valued family more than anything else in the world. So, against everyone’s advice, I sent my entry in.

Welp.

2. You Should Listen To People Who Know Better

I haven’t really gotten a chance to say this on a public forum anyway, but I credit this debut to Stephen Power. He’s an editor in the publishing industry, a soon-to-be published author under the Simon451 banner, and a great person to talk to about how things work. Before I sent in my final manuscript to Abaddon, I ran over to him and went, “How’s this for a synopsis?”

He said nope.

By then, I’d already spent a week researching how to write synopses. I thought I had an idea about what was going on. But he hit me with critiques: this line was too opaque, that line tried to sell too much, this was pretty but it didn’t sell at all. I took his feedback and scurried back to the writing-web and thought things over. Some of his input, I kept. Others I put aside. But generally speaking? His remarks helped massively. Even if I didn’t follow his suggestions to the letter, I used to the spirit to them to rewrite that synopsis. (Thanks, Stephen. You are the best.)

3. Outlines Are Fucking Amazing (But You Should Know What You’re Doing)

Chuck said it first. Outlines rock. They also suck. They rock at sucking, and suck at rocking and somewhere in between that miasma of possibilities, they come together into something truly spectacular. I generally never, ever write outlines. Not for my nonfiction work, not for my short stories, and certainly not for longer pieces. (This is probably why I’ve never sold anything longer than a novella up till now.)

But Abaddon was very, very clear about wanting an outline. A 2,000-word outline. Specifically. So, reluctantly, I started piecing it together.

This was the first time I’d properly ever worked on a structure like this, ever thought it out with constraints. I’ve written them on-spec before, but no one seemed to mind very much if my outline sprawled into a novelette of its own. 2,000 words. Wow. That was something else. It compelled me to start reading up on narrative structures, which I’d only been vaguely aware of before. Lester Dent’s Pulp Master Fiction Plot eventually formed the bones of what I was pursuing. But I didn’t stop there. I hammered in the eight-point plot, reread all of my favorite old myths to see how they’re composed, then read even more things about plots. By the end of it, I’d gotten my outline to a science. It was beautiful. (In my eyes.)

And the funny thing about that is, despite the fact I’d made very specific decisions as to what I wanted to do with the outline, I changed about half of it by the time I started writing. Outlines only seem rigid, but I think they’re more sanity checks than anything else. You can still go wild. They just give you something to cling onto when you’ve realized you’ve digested too much writer acid.

(P.S: I still hate outlines.)

4. You Write What You Know

A tangential revelation that, in retrospect, should have been more obvious: you write what you know, and who you know.

Almost every character in RUPERT WONG, CANNIBAL CHEF is a person of color. There are only two individuals who are not and they’re side characters who exist in their situations because of their ethnicity. If you guessed they were white, you’re right.

Despite the recent push for diversity, I didn’t actually set out to be diverse, strange as that might be to say. Coming from Malaysia, people of color are the status quo. We’re Indian, Chinese, Malay, Kadazan, Dusun, Iban — the list goes on. White people, on the other hand, different. And that kind of bled through. I wrote what I knew: a metropolis where ghosts were almost real, a place where cultures intermingled, where pirated DVDs still abound. I borrowed from our myths and our urban legends. I borrowed from my ethnic culture. (I’m ethnically Chinese, but am a Malaysian citizen.) I borrowed from our ideas of the Western World, who they represented, and what they were.

Not once did I consider having a white main character because, you know, that isn’t how my world view works. In a weird way, it explained to me why the video game industry, for one, is absolutely saturated with white men. People automatically default to what is familiar, to what they recognize when they look around them. That which surrounds you defines your perspective of normal. Consequently, writing my little novella make me a little kinder towards all those people I might have held in suspicion before. Not everyone who writes a stubbled hero is a tunnel-visioned prat.

But at the same time, this doesn’t mean that people can’t and shouldn’t go out of their comfort zones. Video games, genre fiction, and all forms of entertainment can, and always will, benefit from having more voices, more experience. We’re shooting ourselves in the foot if we take the easy route and stick to the narrow scope of what we know. The world is vast, so vast that it’s almost crippling to consider, and if we can expand the breadth of ‘what we know’ to include even a tiny percentage of that enormity — who knows where we can go? I’m doing my damn best to learn from the cultures I encounter in my travels, and I totally recommend you join me in this experiment of mine. I promise you, it won’t suck.

6. Leaving Your Chair Is Good

I don’t know how Chuck does it. I mean, the sheer amount of words he writes in a seating. Jesus Christ. Every time I think about it, I get a bit woozy. The same could be same about any number of writers. (Brandon Sanderson, sir, how the respectful hell do you do it?) It’s genuinely intimidating as to how much people can write.

When I started writing RUPERT WONG, CANNIBAL CHEF, I tried to hold myself to similar standards. It didn’t work. I fizzled out really early, and ended up being burnt-out for a few weeks. I was absolutely crippled by my inability to do as well as the greats. But you know what I learned? You don’t really have to write every day. Not everyone has that capacity. And the moment I realized that, things worked better for me.

I started bolting from the proverbial chair whenever my brain grew sticky with bad prose. I walked away. I played a video game. I went for Muay Thai. I did other things. And that distance, even though it seemed unproductive at first, proved fantastic for me. I wrote more with breaks than without. I wrote more when I started forgiving myself for those hours when I could not. It shouldn’t seem like a revelation, but it was.

So, you. Get out of your chair if you’re having a block. Come back later. Eat a salad. Kiss a person you find attractive. Do something else. It is totally okay.

* * *

Cassandra Khaw is a London-based writer who still has her roots buried deep in Southeast Asia where there are sometimes more ghosts than people. Her work tends to revolve around intersectional cultures, mythological mash-ups, and bizarre urban architecture. When not embroiled in fiction, she writes about technology and video games for a variety of places including RockPaperShotgun and Ars Technica UK. Offerings of fluffy things are always welcomed.

Cassandra Khaw: Website | Twitter

Rupert Wong: Amazon US | Amazon UK

HOLY CRAP, IT’S OUT.

Adam Christopher and I wrote a comic. Our first comic.

Drew Johnson drew it.

Kelly Fitzpatrick did the lettering.

And Rachel Deering did the colors.

AND NOW YOU CAN GO GET IT.

So, you should go get it.

Thanks to Alex Segura and Dark Circle for having us.

More to come. (And come see Adam and me in NYC on 11/3, and Doylestown, PA on 11/13.)

You may have heard there’s a new Star Wars movie.

Something something something Dark Side.

You may have also heard that there’s new novels, too.

Something something something fully gay lesbeans.

And I did a post a few weeks back about the false historicity of canon in terms of pop culture — we feel that it’s all very real, all a history rather than a story someone just made up, and we like to know what’s TRUE versus what’s FALSE in terms of the fictional historicity of the work. It’s both seductive and a little bit dangerous.

While I was at NYCC, at both panels I was at and also in person, folks wanted to talk about the EU and Legends. Politely, to be clear — I was not harangued by anyone. (If you go to the Del Rey Star Wars books Facebook page, you’ll find the same polite responses and requests — and you’ll find some of that haranguing.) Some folks generally have this sense of, if it’s not the thing I grew up with, if it’s not the thing I expect, then I don’t want it. You start to get that talk of childhoods being killed and all that fun stuff, as if people have traveled back in time to someone’s adolescent years in order to Fahrenheit 451 all their EU/Legends books, but only just before karate-kicking their original Star Wars VHS tapes into a cloud of plastic particulate matter.

While there at the con, I hit on a metaphor I like as to how to overcome this feeling that OLD IS BEST and NEW IS BAD and SOMETHING SOMETHING FIRE THE CANON CANNONS.

And I’m going to share this with you now in the hopes it helps you understand the silver lining, here — this is me trying to turn this feeling from a drain into a fountain.

You know Matt Groening, right? The Simpsons creator.

Well, once upon a time as some know, he did a comic called LIFE IN HELL. Amazing comic. Subversive and socially powerful, and also deeply absurdist fun. He hit on things with childhood and work and school and relationships — I still go back to read them from time to time.

In one of the comics, the one-eared rabbit boy, Bongo, is coloring with crayons.

And a bully comes along.

The bully then proceeds to break all of Bongo’s crayons in half. Snap, snap, snap.

Bongo, for many panels if I recall correctly, stares down at his crayons.

And you think, he’s upset.

He’s a kid.

A bully just broke all his crayons.

How could this not destroy him? Someone came along and destroyed the things he had in his hands. The things that he loved. He can’t create anymore. His crayons are ruined.

But then Bongo says: YAY.

And why does Bongo say yay?

Because, he explains, regarding his bounty of broken crayons: NOW I HAVE TWICE AS MANY.

You think someone broke your stories, your universe, your canon.

Instead, maybe envision it instead as YAY, NOW I HAVE TWICE AS MANY.

And then read it all greedily and happily, in glorious gulps and swallows.

Ilana has a debut fantasy novel out — Last Song Before Night — but before that, she’s done a lot of work as an accomplished blogger and freelance writer, so I’m excited to have her here to speak a bit about one skill most writers don’t think, or know, that they need…

* * *

As an author whose first book just came out from Tor, you could say I’ve achieved exactly what I set out to do. And I’ll be real: I set out to do it a long time ago. This is not one of those instances when the author takes up writing on a lark and a novel comes out. If only. It’s more like, when I was a teenager I decided to start taking seriously this dream I’d always had. I was already thirteen, it was time to get moving.

Maybe it’s because I was living in Jerusalem in the mid-90s and fully convinced — not entirely without reason — that I wouldn’t survive high school. (Buffy was to have incredible resonance, years later.) Being a kid, doing things like having fun or whatever, was a waste of time when life was short. (Plus, being in a class of kids who don’t speak your language is not that conducive to having fun either.) So I did two things. I read a lot, and critically. Whatever I read, I picked apart. I looked at the things that worked and tried to figure out why they worked so well. Sometimes I couldn’t figure it out, so I just reread those glorious sections repeatedly, as if to absorb them into my bloodstream. (In retrospect, this means I can open my old notebooks at random and be like, “Right, that’s when I was reading Dune.”)

Because another thing I was doing was writing my own novel. And I worked incessantly. By the end of high school I had completed the first volume of a projected epic fantasy trilogy. I had written it longhand in a series of notebooks. Teachers knew to be suspicious of these notebooks and occasionally they were confiscated.

Eventually I was to give up on the high school novel, dismissing it as too juvenile. I started a new one while still in college. That novel, in the course of years, became Last Song Before Night.

So this is great, right? I did it. I put focused effort into achieving my goal, by developing the skills necessary for that goal, and succeeded.

Fast-forward to this past year at Book Expo America, when I and three other debut authors had the honor of being on a panel hosted by John Scalzi. Except this wasn’t really a panel. It was a game, for the general public, of “Would You Rather?” We would get questions and need to answer them, cleverly, on the fly.

This was a foretaste of what it means to launch a novel out into the world. My calendar for October has been a series of public appearances, readings, another game of “Would You Rather” with Scalzi at New York Comic Con, and — incredibly — a  New England book tour with Fran Wilde and Seth Dickinson where we’ll be visiting five bookstores in five states in five days or something like that. And answering questions, and being witty, and hopefully impressing the ever-loving hell out of everyone.

I did not do a single damn thing in my life to prepare for this. And it’s made me reflect on this dissonant quality to being a writer: what makes us excel at our work, what gets our books to the level of being publishable, involves being alone, a lot. No matter how many workshops you attend, ultimately the work only gets done when it’s just you and the page. Or just you and the necessary act of reading. All of it intensely alone.

And now my success, or at least a good fraction of it, might hinge on how scintillating I can be in public appearances. I’ve been thinking back and realizing that authors’ behavior at their events has occasionally influenced my interest in their work. If an author seems brilliant and confident at an event, I think we are programmed to expect that same acumen reflected on the printed page.

But there’s one thing I’m learning: Experience helps. With five readings behind me, I’m starting to enjoy doing them. And at the recent panel at New York Comic Con, I was surprised to find that I was not nervous beforehand. I knew all eyes would be on me and I would be expected to make clever responses to surprise questions, but there was a corner of my brain, newly awakened, that said, “You’ve been here before. You’ve got this.”  And also: “Have fun.” Because hey, I finally have a book out. That is pretty awesome.

Now I’m not going to say it was all flawless, but it was better. And maybe that experience will pave the way to the next appearance being better. And the next one.

Recently I went to a consignment shop and found a designer red dress on sale for a ridiculously low price. Not deep red. Not maroon, which I’ve been wont to wear in the past. Shocking, fire engine red. The kind of thing I’d never have worn before, favoring instead more modest shades of blue or purple or green. I bought it.

I haven’t prepared for this, and there are going to be moments when a witty comeback eludes me, or people notice my hands shaking (this happens, especially if I haven’t eaten), or I am simply stumped for a response for several seconds (this has happened too). But if you see me at these events, and I am wearing the red dress, you’ll know I’m wearing it to remind myself that the time for solitary communing has passed. It’s time to be out in the world and visible among people, at least for now. I have a book out, the thing I’ve worked toward my whole life. This is no time to hide.

* * *

Ilana C. Myer has written for the Globe and Mail, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, and the Huffington Post. Previously she was a freelance journalist in Jerusalem for the Jerusalem Post, the Jewish Daily Forward, Time Out Israel and other publications. She lives in New York City.

Ilana C. Myer: Website | Twitter

Last Song Before Night: Indiebound | Amazon

*pinches bridge of nose*

*exhales noisily*

Of course there’s a Star Wars Episode VII boycott. And there’s a hashtag to boot. Because of course there’s a hashtag. One-click buffet-style serving of shittiness, coming right up.

(Behold, the Mary Sue article about it.)

Apparently people are mad because blah blah black dude protagonist with a lightsaber, or girl protagonist, or Latino X-Wing pilot protagonist, and not enough straight white dudes. And folks are mad enough to join in on the hashtag and — nngh. Bleh. Meh. Gnarrgh. I mean, what version of Star Wars did you watch? The one where Luke Skywalker is a racist hick shitbird? The one where the Empire are the good guys because yay oppression and fascism and totalitarian chic?

Okay, first, let’s talk about the efficacy of such a hashtag, which is to say, it will have literally no effect at all. You’re throwing pebbles at mountains, bro. Boycotting Star Wars is like boycotting the sun. It will do nothing. The sun will keep on shining. Its heat will remain radiant and globally present. It will remain at the center of this space and we will continue to orbit it in an elliptical manner. Your efforts will have no meaningful result except to reveal yourself as a cruddy dingleberry dangling from fandom’s ass-hairs.

My greatest desire is to yell at you. To just rant and gesticulate and do the internet dance of anger all over you, because what special dumbness, this is.

But instead I’m going to try to talk to you, in the assumption that somewhere out there in the seething throng of crappy people exists some who are not yet all the way gone to the Dark Side.

There is good in you. No, not you. Not you either. YOU. Right there.

I’m talking to those who can be reached.

As one straight white dude to other straight white dudes, let’s talk.

You are clearly consumers of sci-fi and fantasy pop culture, which is at least a little bit suggestive that somewhere under that stormtrooper mask is a brain with an imagination.

I want you now to imagine along with me, Mister Rogers-style.

Let’s imagine that you are, as you are now, a straight white dude. Except, your world features one significant twist — the SFF pop culture you consume is almost never about you. The faces of the characters do not look like yours. The creators of this media look nothing like you, either. Your experiences are not represented. Your voice? Not there. There exist in these universes no straight white dudes. Okay, maybe one or two. Some thrown in to appease. Sidekicks and bad guys and walk-on parts. Token chips flipped to the center of the table just to make you feel like you get to play, too. Oh, all around you in the real world, you are well-represented. Your family, your friends, the city you live in, the job you work — it’s straight white dude faces up and down the block. But on screen? In books? Inside comic panels and as video game characters? Almost none. Too few. Never the main characters.

It feels isolating, and you say so.

And as a response you’re told, “Hey, take what you get.” They say, can’t you have empathy for someone who doesn’t look like you? Something something humanist, something something equalist. And of course you can have that empathy because you have to, because this is all you know, because the only faces and words and experiences on-screen are someone else’s so, really, what else are you going to do?

Then one day, things start to change. A little, not a lot, but shit, it’s a start — you start to see yourself up there on the screen. Sometimes as a main character. Sometimes behind the words on the page, sometimes behind the camera. A video game avatar here, a protagonist there. And it’s like, WOO HOO, hot hurtling hell, someone is actually thinking about you once in a while. And the moment that happens, wham. A backlash. People online start saying, ugh, this is social justice, ugh, this is diversity forced down our throats, yuck, this is just bullshit pandering quota garbage SJW — and you’re like, whoa, what? Sweet crap, everyone else has been represented on screen since the advent of film. They’ve been on the page since some jerk invented the printing press. But the moment you show up — the moment you get more than a postage stamp-sized bit of acreage in this world that has always been yours but never really been yours, people start throwing a shit-fit. They act like you’re unbalancing everything. Like you just moved into the neighborhood and took a dump in everybody’s marigolds just because you exist visibly.

You have 100 toys, and someone comes along and asks for a toy of their own, and you start screaming about DIVERSITY SJW GENOCIDE REVERSE RACISM SEXISM AAAAAAH.

That’s fucked up, right?

That’s what’s happening, except it’s not happening to you.

I was at NYCC this year and last, and a friend — the artist known as Joey Hi-Fi — pointed out quite correctly that the audience at NYCC is incredibly diverse. And they are at NYCC consuming media that is incredibly not-diverse. I saw it in my own signings. The people who came up and had me sign books at 47 North or for Star Wars? Not a bunch of straight white guys. A lot of women. A lot of faces that were not my own. And some self-identified LGBT folks, too. That’s awesome. Awesome in a lot of ways. Awesome because the audience is bigger than anybody expected. Awesome because it’s expressive of a world that is not singular, not simple, that is far-reaching and full of variety and tons of people who don’t look or act at all like each other but still find common ground in cool stuff like Star Wars. And it’s also sad because, y’know, the content is not equal to the audience. The stories have not yet caught up to reality. That’s true on the page, on the screen, and behind the scenes with the creators and the executives and everything.

Listen, I get it — this problem is not my problem. Inclusion isn’t for me. I’m covered. I am already included. Luke? Me. Han Solo? Me. Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon, Anakin, Wedge, me, me, me. And it’s not just Star Wars. John McClane, Harry Potter, Frodo, Iron-Man. All a bunch of white guys saving the day. Hell, Santa Claus. Or damn near every painting of Jesus, who was clearly not a white guy but is often depicted as a white guy. We do our level best to paint ourselves as the heroes of our own narrative. It’s white guys all the way down. I’m golden over here. I don’t need more representation. I have had my fill to the point where my pop culture belly is a-burstin.

In fact, I’m so glutton-fed I figure it’s time for a diet.

Which is why I’ve tried very hard to vary my reading. Which is why in Aftermath the protagonists are: a Mom, a gay dude, a lady bounty hunter. It’s why the Imperial antagonist is a powerful woman of color. (I’m no culture hero here, to be clear — I did the bare minimum in including different characters. It’s not like I have Sinjir engaging in sweaty man-love with Wedge Antilles. He is gay and he is present and he is visible and that has been enough to conjure  100+ negative reviews and an unholy host of comments, hate mails, and social media ‘interactions.’ Don’t believe me? Here’s four pages of reviews — 1, 2, 3, 4 — and that’s just me searching for the term “homosexual” across the one-star reviews. It’s just the tip of that septic shitberg.)

Point is, I don’t need to see me on the page as often as I have. And while I wouldn’t want to steal someone’s voice and make it my own, at the same time, in a sci-fi novel, I think we’re okay. And writers of any salt or stripe are expected to know how to write beyond the singular experience of being who you are. And readers should be able to read just as capably. What, you can get behind a protagonist who is a dragon, or a Wookiee, or an animated monster, but you can’t get behind another human being who looks different? You gotta have some empathy. No one can make you understand different people. You have to try. You gotta draw the bridge between you and other humans. It exists. But you have to see it. You have to believe in it. You have to be the one to reach out and look for the similarities of experience, not just the differences. (But differences matter, too. And it’s important to grok why that is and not erase those differences or those experiences.)

You gotta realize the world isn’t for you.

It’s for everyone.

And that needs to start happening in media, too.

Nice thing with Star Wars is, it is happening. Look at the protagonists of The Force Awakens. Look at Lucasfilm. They’re openly committing to finding a woman director for Star Wars. Kathleen Kennedy notes: “Fifty percent of our executive team are women. Six out of eight of the people in my Story Group are women. I think it’s making a huge difference in the kind of stories we’re trying to tell.” Some of the story group are also people of color. It’s a start. Especially when it’s starting in one of the biggest SFF franchises ever. Perfect? No. Nothing is. But it’s nice to see changes happening. It’s nice to see some equity there between the audience that consumes this stuff and the people who make it. Stories matter to people. Characters matter. Creation matters. Nobody should be excluded. Inclusion is awesome.

And if you oppose that — you know, hey, fuck you. Go on and throw pebbles at mountains. Go on and boycott the sun. Let me know how that works out for you.

Meanwhile, I’m gonna be over here enjoying what’s to come. I suggest trying it. Loving stuff instead of hating it. Accepting the world as it is, not the world as you mistakenly hope it will be.

To everyone else: may the Force be with you.

And hey — NEW TRAILER TONIGHT.

*teeth vibrate with sonic joy*

*fingers become lightsabers*

*wampa roar*

HEY LOOK AT THAT.

Official description:

It’s Atlanta’s senior year of high school, and she is officially infamous. Not only has she saved herself from a predator, brought down an untouchable dogfighting ring, and battled a pack of high-school bullies, but she’s also proclaimed to the Internet her willingness to fight for anyone who needs help. And Atlanta can’t believe what’s coming out of the woodwork. From an old friend to a troop of troubled girls with connections to a local fracking company, there’s definitely fire in the water. As always, the girl with the unforgettable name is not afraid to burn it all down if it means making things right. But as high school races toward its inevitable end and the hornets begin to swarm from all directions, Atlanta must decide how much of herself and her growing group of friends she is willing to risk…before it’s too late.

Book comes out February, 2016.

You can pre-order it right now.

Cover Contortions

Read for Pixels is a campaign to raise funds to help stop violence against women globally.

This year, Jim C. Hines has come out of retirement and entered the arena with a promise that, should the campaign get $10,000 in funding, he will once more do a cover pose — where he apes the pose made by a contorted woman on a SFF book cover in the tradition of gender-flipping.

Well, this year I have been challenged.

I HAVE BEEN CHALLENGED.

And in a fit of abject foolishness, I have accepted this challenge.

Which means Jim and I will do a cover pose battle, and you can help choose the cover.

But all that only happens if the campaign makes $15,000 in funding by its date.

And it only has a couple weeks left.

So, get on over there and make it happen. Donate here.

The Mockingbird Killer Has Returned

Last month, Blackbirds returned to print.

And this month, Mockingbird is back.

(The Cormorant returns in February if you wanna pre-order.)

So, so, so excited to have these so they can get in people’s hands.

You can find the paperback at most bookstores. I think the hardcover has a much shorter print run for both books, and my understanding is you can only get those through Amazon or BN online. And believe you me, the hardcover editions are sexy-sexy.

Go make grabby-grabby.

And don’t let Miriam Black touch you.

(Miriam Black book trailer here, if you haven’t seen it.)

Thunderbird Delayed?

Is Thunderbird’s publishing date changing? Maybe. I’ll let you know when I have more info, but the goal would be to do something a bit more innovative with the publishing schedule for the final three books — something that gets them out in more rapid succession so that there’s not a year between books (which was the original goal). I actually just finished edits on that book and they were the weirdest set of edits — like, they were heavy edits, but nothing fundamentally changed about the book. Not a rewrite, just a great deal of massaging — a stronger edit to lift the book toward theme, toward better language, toward apt character.

Meanwhile, some don’t realize that there’s a novella set between Cormorant and Thunderbird called “Interlude: Swallow.” It’s part of a trio of tales by me, Kevin Hearne, and Delilah S. Dawson! It’s called THREE SLICES and you should go shove it in your brain-mouth.

Event in Charlotte, NC

I’m going to be doing an event at Queens University in Charlotte, NC on November 19th. 8pm, open to the public. Come say hi! Or throw things at my head. Nice things. Like wads of money and rare birds and various gems of various sizes. Event deets here.

The Oklahoman Reviews Zer0es

A great review right here if you care to read it.

(Note, the review is a bit spoilery.)

“What follows is a white-knuckle race to discover the truth about Typhon and stop it before it’s too late. “Zeroes” is one of the most satisfying hacker novels to come down the fiber optic pipeline in a long time.”

Check out Zer0es at Indiebound, Amazon, or B&N.

And Finally, The Shield!

The Shield #1 is coming out THIS WEEK.

*breathes into a bag*

My first real comic! Me and Adam Christopher, holding hands and leaping into the FOUR-COLOR MAELSTROM, BABY. Woo! Nothing can stop us now.

A round up of some Shield-related media:

Entertainment Weekly!

Bleeding Cool!

Adventures in Poor Taste!

And a cool review from Graphic Policy:

“The story by Adam Christopher and Chuck Wendig, unfolds a spy thriller, hurling the reader the reader into a world of high stakes politics and secret identities. The art by Drew Johnson is luminescent and drawn with realistic tones, which serves this action packed narrative. Overall, probably the best comic to come out of the Dark Circle imprint and one that is long overdue.”

Also, Adam and I will be doing a couple events together! He’ll be touring the US for his new Tor novel, Made to Kill (which is rad and you want it), and he and I will be doing an event at KGB Bar / Red Room in NYC with WORD bookstores on November 3rd. Then, a week later, we’ll do a thing at Doylestown Bookshop in Doylestown, PA. That’s on November 13th (FRIDAY MWA HA HA HA) and you can find out more here. Hope to see you at one of the events!