John Wick meets Johnny Mnemonic in a nail-biting cyberpunk technothriller about a courier on the run from his own Guild

Corporations fall, gangsters are killed, but no-one messes with the Couriers Guild.

When Armand Pierce first became a courier ten years ago, he had an attaché case connected to a titanium cuff grafted into the bones of his wrist, and took an oath: the delivery is everything. He can run, fight—kill, if he needs to—but the package gets where it’s going. It’s the Guild’s guarantee, and since the internet went down in the Cyber Wars, all business, legitimate or otherwise, depends on it. Otherwise, he dies.

So Pierce knows he’s in deep trouble when he arrives at his latest destination to find his payload missing, his case mysteriously empty. Something strange is going on: something that’s already cost three couriers their lives, and threatens to upend the global order. And Pierce had better get to the bottom of it, before the Guild, catches up to him.

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The Ideas Aren’t Ready Until They’re Ready

Writing The Price of Everything was a more educational experience than any other book I’ve written. Partly, that’s because it simply took me so long to write it.

Some of the ideas for the book had been rattling around in my brain for well over a decade. I thought then and I still think today that they are fascinating and compelling. But the stories I first tried to write them into were not. They didn’t do the ideas justice. They were lame.

But I didn’t give up on them, or at least not permanently. And I’m glad I didn’t. Whether it was because I was becoming a better writer, or the world was changing in ways that made the ideas more relevant or compelling, or simply because the ideas themselves needed to mature, not in a decrepit, falling apart, death is inexorably approaching and my knees are killing me kind of way, but, you know, to become wiser and more distinguished. What I’m trying to say is, I learned that sometimes an idea simply isn’t ready until it’s ready.

The Book Isn’t Ready Until It’s Ready, Either

While some of the ideas in the book have been in my head for decades, some of the words have been on the page for almost as long.

I started writing the first draft back in 2015 (and as an outliner, that means I’d already been working on it for some time). Now, to be fair, in that time I also wrote four other novels (and another almost completed, plus a couple more ghostwritten), as well as several screenplays and a bunch of short stories. But this book required a lot of revisions, even reconceptualizations.

My wife and I jokingly call The Price of Everything “my most celebrated work” because of how many times I declared it finished (drafts, edits, revisions) and insisted we toast its completion. Only to find out it wasn’t done.

And then I’d get back to work.

It was hard. I mean, I know how important it is to kill your darlings sometimes, but we’re talking several generations of darlings, entire extended families of darlings. And these weren’t just personal favorites: they were objectively legitimate darlings.

But they didn’t fit. They didn’t work. Not in this book, or what this book was supposed to be. And so they had to go. (Truth be told, I saved them all; you don’t really have to kill your darlings, you just have to lock them in the basement.)

Sometimes Slow Can Be Better

I have always strived to be a fast writer, to be productive. Maybe even prolific (I mean, not like my pals Chuck Wendig or Jonathan Maberry—give me a break, I’m only human). But working for so long on this book, on so many iterations of it, has shown me the benefits of taking such time.

I’ve always been an outliner, always depended on knowing where I was going when writing a story. (And yes: however many revisions there were, that’s how many outlines there were.) But over the years I’ve come to appreciate almost as much the way outlining helps me get to know my characters intimately before I start writing that first draft, instead of getting to know them along the way.

A similar benefit accrues from working on a book for so long. As I said, I worked on many other projects while I was writing this one, but The Price of Everything was always in my head—maybe not front of mind, but in there. And the whole time it was, I was gaining a deeper and more nuanced understanding of those characters.

Part of the premise of The Price of Everything is that, with the internet cratered by cyberwar, the economy once again runs on cash. A guild of elite couriers moves the new super-high-denomination currency around in attaché cases chained to titanium cuffs grafted onto the bones of their wrists. The couriers swear an oath: The delivery gets where it is going or they forfeit that hand, and effectively their life. I think it’s a fascinating premise, but I had to live with the idea for some time before I grasped how deeply disturbing and metaphorically relevant it was: an economy so inequitable that young people agree to be disfigured—and potentially even forfeit their lives—in order to protect some billionaire’s money.

Writing all those different iterations helped, as well, giving me the opportunity to see these characters in different situations, different worlds or timelines or dimensions. It gave me a much deeper understanding of them.

The same is true of the themes of the book: wealth disparity, the rise of American oligarchs and the billionaire class—and how that has exacerbated our failures to confront climate change. The longer I and the book were allowed to steep in these themes, the more they became intrinsically interwoven into the story and the characters. Unfortunately, as often seems to be the case when one is writing dystopic fiction these days, the world has leaned into the story. Good for the book; bad for the planet.

I Am Stubborn AF

Something else I learned in writing this book is about me. For better or for worse (and there are definite downsides to it, believe me), I am tenacious. Or maybe stubborn. Very likely both. At many times during this book’s long road to publication there were very good reasons to put it aside forever and say, “Well, I tried.”

There are many costs to writing a book, including opportunity costs—millions of other things you could be doing, including writing other books. I’ll never know what else I could have written in the time I spent writing this one, because I was too stubborn to give up on it. But I do know this: I love this book. I love how it ended up and how it got there. And I hope readers will love it, too.

One More Thing…

As always, I learned a lot while researching this book. Here’s one little factoid that raises all sorts of questions:  Of all the pieces of paper US currency in circulation, the most common isn’t the single (14.9 billion) or the twenty (11.1 billion), but the hundred dollar bill. There are 19.2 billion C-notes in circulation, more than any other denomination.

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Jon McGoran is the author of ten previous novels for adults and young adults, including the YA science fiction thrillers Spliced, Splintered, and Spiked, the science thrillers Drift, Deadout, and Dust Up, numerous short stories and novellas, and licensed work for The Blacklist, The X-Files, and Zombies vs Robots. A freelance writer, writing teacher, and developmental editor and coach, he lives outside Philadelphia with his wife Elizabeth, a librarian. For more, visit www.jonmcgoran.com

The Price of Everything: Bookshop.org | Kobo | Libro.fm | B&N

Barry Gray isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but that hasn’t stopped him from becoming the middle-aged CEO of Atlas Wake, the corporation behind the most addictive energy drink in the world. After an awkward date, Barry is “X-ed”—a fate worse than getting canceled…just days before the company’s biggest beverage launch. The reason? An ancient social media post.

As the Atlas Wake executives scramble to find a replacement for Barry, they stumble upon Lo, a sardonic barista with no social media history. Lo eagerly steps into the CEO role, anticipating stacks of cash, only to be jolted by a shocking discovery about the company’s new energy drink — it’s causing people to explode.

Fearing his new life as a social pariah, Barry is rescued by the Brotherhood of the Resigned, a group of X-ed outcasts hiding in the sewers. They believe Atlas Wake is part of a giant conspiracy in which Lo is now entangled. Stories collide as our crew faces a corporate-dominated world on the brink of destruction in this darkly humorous, dystopian tale of power, deceit, and survival.

THEMES CHANGE

“What if canceled individuals were forced to live underground like mole people?” This was my initial idea for SITUATION NOWHERE, and it made me laugh a lot. I thought maybe I was writing a satire on “cancel culture.” (I know.) But after several chapters, I realized the topic was just the starting gun, an inciting incident.

I’m going to write a sentence that is going to make us all cringe a little bit. But it’s the truth…

The novel started taking a life of its own.

I know! I hate myself for writing that. “Oooh, Bobby, your book started talking to you? HOW PRECIOUS!” But it did! And it turned out the book was annoyed at lots of things! AI art, late-stage capitalism, corporate consumerism, the list goes on!

Sure. I could have told the book to shut up. I had an outline, after all! It should obey me! But I was having too much damn fun writing the thing that I let it take over. No regrets.

AI ART IS NOTHING TO FEAR

Let me not mince words. I believe big tech has slowly, methodically devalued art. The arrival of generative AI only exacerbates the perilous condition we’re in.  In my book, all of this is played for maximum absurdity, but in writing it, I realized AI “art” is something I no longer fear. Sure, I still think it’s for losers! Folks who don’t want to put in the work. But I’m not upset about it. No large language model can write how you or I write. (I’m pretty sure LLMS are not ingesting childhood trauma!)

Yes. AI “art” will further decimate the job market for artists, and we’ll need to find a new model that works for us. But AI “art” itself has limited value. Why would anyone pay money for purely synthetic work? It’s the human fingerprints that make art worth enjoying. If anything, human-made art will become more valuable in the age of “AI slop.”

EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE AND FUNNY?

There are plenty of things that keep me up at night. I have existential dread like you wouldn’t believe. But I’ve always found solace in comedy. I wanted my first book to be propulsive and entertaining, a book with things to say! A mystery to unpack!

Most importantly, I wanted it to be funny until the last line—a balm for these chaotic times. I always hoped people would find comfort in the book, but I didn’t realize that writing it would be a much-needed tonic for me. It kept me sane and laughing; sometimes, that’s all one needs to get through this life.

FINDING TIME TO WRITE SAVED MY SOUL.

I became a dad during the pandemic. At the time, I had no idea what the future held. I had directed two feature films and wondered if I would ever direct again. In this creative void, short stories began to pour out of me, eventually coalescing around this novel. I ultimately had to return to office, and my free time drastically shrank. Before the pandemic, before becoming a dad, I could get by finding jobs that could work around my writing schedule. But now it was different. I had to find the time.

I decided the only way was to wake up extremely early. Before the family was up before the day job started…If I could just squirrel away one hour, I could quickly write a first draft and chip away at this thing. (At night, I would edit.) Eventually, piece by piece, the book came together. Was it easy? No. But it is possible. I would argue that having limited time zeroed in my attention. There was no scrolling on social media and no wasted time. I had my hour, and I was flying. And brother, it was fantastic. To have this secret thing while the world seemed on fire. It was a blessing and saved my artistic soul.

CHASING TRENDS NEVER WORKED FOR ME

In the film business, I was fortunate to direct something I wrote. But after that initial success, I began chasing trends. Writing screenplays that weren’t me. I wanted to make a living! The great irony is that the only work that has gotten me any attention has been deeply felt idiosyncratic weirdness. I viewed the pandemic and fatherhood as the great reset button. There was no more time for chasing what I thought people wanted. I needed to listen to my gut.

I also wanted to hold myself accountable. On a film set, you can point blame at myriads of things that can go wrong. “If only we had three more days to shoot,” etc. I was tired of pointing fingers! I wanted to write something that I was solely responsible for. Something I could be confident in saying, “This is me!”

I needed to get out a big scattershot satire with tons of goop. For better or for worse, that’s me. I loved writing it. It saved my life. And now it’s your problem.

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Bobby Miller is a writer and filmmaker from New Jersey who lives in Los Angeles. His films have premiered at Sundance, SXSW, and Fantasia. His fiction has appeared in Maudlin House, Expat Press, and Bending Genres. SITUATION NOWHERE is his debut novel.

Bobby Miller: Substack | Social Media
Situation Nowhere: BookShop  | Publisher | B&N | Amazon Kindle

When I was in college in North Carolina, I flew home to Pennsylvania for the holidays. My mother and father were going through a divorce at that point (a divorce that should’ve happened many years before), and so my father had decided I had to spend my holiday weekend staying with him, not her, and given that he was paying for the plane ticket and such, I agreed. He was supposed to pick me up from the airport, but he didn’t.

His friend did. A guy I had maybe met once or twice before. I met him, went to his car, and once on the road this guy, a relative stranger, gave me shit because he was trying to hit on flight attendants in the airport and I “interrupted” him getting laid at the airport. (Note, this is pre-9/11, when you could just free range it through the airport even if you didn’t have a flight. And I guess this guy was thinking he could Get Some at the Airport Applebees counter, or some shit.)

When he told me this, I smelled the alcohol on his breath. And then I noticed his driving was, ahhh, not good. I realized he’d been in the airport, not just hitting on flight staff, but drinking. He was drunk. I was in a car with a drunk driver. And at that point, my options were minimal. Wrestling control of the car away from him would’ve probably crashed us. And he was certainly trying to crash us anyway, weaving in and out of traffic. Best I could do was buckle the fuck up and try to be calm enough so as not to rile this guy, who seemed like he was not the most stable individual.

Living here in America right now feels like that time.

Stuck riding shotgun in a car with a drunk driver.

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It’s hard to focus. It’s hard to focus on the things in front of me, that I need to do. It’s hard to focus on the news, because it’s not just one thing, it’s a hundred things, news like fire ants, like you stepped on their mound and here they are, swarming, and each ant feels meaningless in the context of all these angry fucking ants. Looking at my phone or computer or any connected device feels like tonguing a broken tooth–an electric jolt of pain but one that feels paradoxically satisfying, like if I poke the bad tooth, maybe I’m fixing it, maybe poking it makes it fall out and the pain will go away. Which I know is fucking stupid so then I stop doing it — stop looking at the phone, stop poking the tooth. But there’s a little rat scratching in the back of my head and it makes me wonder, what are you missing, what aren’t you seeing, remain vigilant, constant vigilance, there’s a great wave coming, a wall of fire, a meteor, a swarm of wasps, better look, better click, and then I look, and am rewarded. By some definition of that word, “rewarded.” My anxiety is rewarded because things are bad, and things are happening constantly. You take three hours off your Diligent Watch, twenty horrible things have happened. ICE stole your mother. Trump threw the fact-checkers in a pit. DOGE fired all the people who watch for plane crashes and tornadoes and pathogens in your food. Elon Musk smuggled a xenomorph aboard a SpaceX flight. RFK Jr is hiding a zombie bite. It’s all happening. It’s all coming for you all the time always.

---

It’s hard to have hope. Hope is a thing with wings, the poet lady said, but its wings have been clipped and it thrashes on the ground looking for a way to get up, get out, go go go, but it can’t, so there it is, in the dirt, thrashing.

---

Hope persists, though. Hope maybe isn’t the thing with wings but hope is the stubborn green thing, its stem-and-leaf pushing up through what seems to be limitless concrete. It finds a breach and it pushes. Pushes and pushes. Grows and grows. Hoping no one steps on it or sprays it with weed-killer.

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Sometimes you kinda forget. That it’s all happening. Okay, maybe you don’t forget, not exactly, but it drifts to the back of your mind where you can’t hear the chimpanzee screams and the clamor and the banging of drums. And in those moments, normalcy occurs, unbidden, uninvited. A gentle soft settling into an old feeling, life like a nice pair of sweatpants. Family dinner, a funny show, birdsong. Some emotionally-dysregulating version of Severance: your innie descends into the chaos mines, reading the news, feeling the fear, making plans, enduring calamity. Your outie makes dinner and tells jokes and dances to the playlist you built. Then the phone lights up, the elevator ding, and the innie rushes back in to see how flu and measles have combined to form the superbug, flusles, or how all the turtles are dead now.

---

You know there’s ice cream and you know you shouldn’t eat it because a part of you desires to be in better shape. When the Secret Police come for you, you’re gonna have to run, and you can’t do that with a Body by Jeni’s, no, no, you must be lean protein, a gazelle to flee their nets, but also, it’s ice cream, and you crave joy, some joy, any joy, and who knows, we might not even have ice cream in a year, they’ll outlaw it, or tariff it so it costs $50 a pint, or your flavor choices will be Listeria or Ivermectin, so you say fuck it, and you eat the ice cream. Each spoonful is a little vacation. But later you feel bad and you wonder if the trade-off for joy was worth it when they catch you and throw you in the SuperDoom prison they built on the fucking moon.

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Yesterday I saw a bag of chips at the store that was $14.99. Beef tallow potato chips. This wasn’t Erewhon. The bag of chips was small. Things are stupid.

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Maybe it’s like turbulence on an airplane, you think. Just a bumpy unpleasant awful experience you gotta get through. But when turbulence hits it’s not because the pilot is a guy who doesn’t “know planes,” when turbulence hits they don’t disappear the ninth row people out the airlock because they “look different” and are “probably causing the problem.” Planes don’t have airlocks, do they? Whatever. My brain is spray cheese.

Maybe it’s a vaccine, you think. Maybe we need this ugly dose of What Can Be in order to avoid What Could Come. Then again we had four years of it the first time and somehow, immunity didn’t take. Maybe we fucked that up and now it’s a drug-resistant socio-political superbug. Or maybe the medical metaphor is wrong and the dude is just the antichrist. I wasn’t religious before but he’s enough to make me believe.

Maybe it’s good to look to history, you think. History goes in cycles. This is not the first Very Stupid Very Bad Time in history, and it will not be the last. Yet humanity continues on. A comfort! Then you think, yeah maybe it shouldn’t have because we seem incapable of learning from history. Sure, reading history is fascinating. But living it fucking sucks. The lesson is, we didn’t learn the lesson. The fuck do we do with that?

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Sometimes I think it’s climate change. That we’ve boiled the planet thanks to capitalism and it’s boiled our brains. And our brains are already a soggy dish sponge full of lead and microplastics anyway.

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Late-stage capitalism is fun to say until you realize it’s the same thing, mostly, as late-stage cancer. A disease that has progressed so far you can’t stop it now, you can just ride it out and find peace before *fart noise*

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Yeah, it’s like being a passenger in a drunk driver’s car. It’s also like working in an office building where new management just took over, and they’re a bunch of old braindeads and young dipshits and all of them are running around with sledgehammers and cartoon bundles of dynamite, knocking down load-bearing walls because “it’ll open the place up.” You think you ought to go work somewhere else but they also took over those buildings, too. They’re everywhere now, like termites.

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It does feel really stupid. It’s callous and it’s evil and it’s craven but it’s also very, very stupid. Clown-show, clown-shoe, clown-shit stupid. It’s like, at least once a day I’m all, these guys? THESE guys? THIS is what’s happening, and THESE fucking guys are doing it? Are you fucking kidding me? You couldn’t write this as fiction. It’d be too on-the-nose. Satire written by a concussed eight-year-old. Reality written by ChatGPT.

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Writing is hard right now. Releasing a book is hard. Promoting that book is, say it with me, hard. It’s not trivial but it feels trivial. Like performing a puppet show in the town square as the town burns down. It feels good to do it and you want others to feel good while reading it but you also know feeling good right now also feels somehow bad, and maybe that’s one of the most fucked up things of all. They didn’t take joy but they took the joy of feeling joy away, made it feel wrong and strange. Turned happiness into a hot stove.

Still, I write. I gotta write. Pay the bills but also because it’s an escape in its way. I like to say it’s an act of resistance, and maybe it is, because they certainly don’t want me or you or anybody doing it. They want to censor and steal and feed it all into the wood chipper of AI so it can sloppily spill all that artbarf out onto the floor and then they hire us back at half-rate or less, so we become the ones not making the art but instead scooping up the artbarf and pushing it into some kind of shape, some kind of digital particleboard. Like Dreyfuss in Close Encounters, smooshing his mashed potatoes into the shape of a mountain. This means something. But it doesn’t mean anything.

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Sometimes it feels like the pandemic. But that was better, in a lot of ways. Because we were all together in it, at least at first. Singing for health staff and staying home and whispering sweet nothings to our collective sourdough starter. But then we stopped singing and we politicized staying safe and we stopped feeding our sourdough starters and now the ghosts of those sourdough starters are really fucking pissed at us. Honestly maybe they’re the ones doing this to us. Maybe we stopped tending them and then they died and now they’re seeking revenge on us. Maybe this is a metaphor for democracy. We should’ve tended our democracy yeast goo better.

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One weird thing that gives me hope, real hope, is that for the last eight-plus years, I could drive around this area and I knew, I knew there were houses that you could count on to have all the TRUMP SHIT out. The banners and flags and crazy-person signs and rah-rah-rah, Dear Leader, Dear Leader. I drive around now and those houses, almost all of them, have taken down their Dear Leader shit. Maybe it’s because they know it’s not popular but I think for some of them it’s because they’re finally starting to see. Eight years of cult propaganda on their lawns, gone. I drove up through Pennsyltucky last weekend, a good hour’s drive, a drive I’ve made before. And I knew I was going to see a lot of gloaty-bloaty Trump shit on their lawns, porches, houses. I saw one. One house with signs out. The house was condemned. Half of it, falling down. Junk all over the lawn. Nobody lived there anymore, by the look of it. And even if they did, they didn’t.

It’s that. It’s the protests, too. Big protests. Just getting started. People are mad. Big mad. There’s a feral Philadelphia energy afoot. I do like it.

So that’s where I get hope. People are waking up. They should’ve woke the fuck up a while ago, but we started to pretend woke, being awake, was a bad thing, when it’s really the most important thing.

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Onward we go. Upward, we hope, but let’s remember, the wings are clipped. So it’s probably flat or even downward for awhile. Sometimes sharp drops, other times a spiral. Like a flushing toilet.

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The postscript to the drunk driver holiday story is, I got back to the house alive, the driver managing to keep on the road. My father was at home, also drunk. Probably too drunk to have picked me up. We had a bad, bad couple days after that. And before Christmas I fucked off out of there, wrote him a note that said fuck you, I was gone, and he could do whatever he wanted to do with that, cancel my plane ticket or cut me out of the will or whatever. At the end of the trip, he called me and told me he’d take me to the airport. He was nice in the car. Not drunk. Told me how bad drunk driving was and I should never do it — after all, my sister had been hit by a drunk driver a few years before, and it fucked up her leg permanently. He told me this with what seemed to be no awareness that he had sent a friend to pick me up drunk, but I also knew he was telling me it because he damn well knew he had sent someone to pick me up drunk. Sometimes we learn lessons, other times we don’t learn shit and stuff just happens, but we pretend we had it figured out all along and we hope everyone just forgets.

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Buy my book or I perish in the abyss, please and thank you.

PSST. One week left — less than one week, actually, since it ends 4/29 — to get in your preorders from Doylestown Bookshop. Which means you get cool stickers (long as the supplies hold out) and also a unique [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS] personalization —

And, to talk about that personalization for a moment, some people have asked what it is, and I’ll say, it’s similar to the “I invent an evil heirloom apple all for you” vibe, but, uhh, specific to this book.

For those who really, really gotta know, I’ll spoil it now under this ROT13 cipher, which you can decipher here —

Lbh jvyy trg lbhe irel bja ebbz vafvqr gur ubeevoyr ubhfr gung jnvgf orlbaq gur fgnvef

That deadline is not a deadline to preorder the book in general, just the preorder deadline for Doylestown Bookshop to ship to you with all goodies and such intact. You can of course still preorder from your local, or get the book from the events I’ll be attending —

So! Yes! Book! Soon. Sorry for shouting and doing the marketing book promo dance, as certainly there is A LOT OF STUFF GOING ON RIGHT NOW and this kind of thing feels trivial and silly. But hope you need a good book as much as I do right now, and further, I hope this book, my book, fits that bill.

And hope to see you out on the road so we can commiserate about, well–

*gesticulates wildly*

OKAY LOVE YOU BYE

If you give Oberon the Irish wolfhound a bath, he’s going to ask you for a story. Fortunately, his human, Atticus, has many centuries of life under his belt as the Iron Druid, and a whole lot of stories to share. Enjoy twelve new short stories from the New York Times bestselling series the Iron Druid Chronicles.

Join Oberon and his Boston terrier buddy, Starbuck, in the tub as they hear about Corrie Ten Boom, Junko Tabei, Francisco de Miranda, Johannes Kepler, and many other figures from history spanning centuries. Sack Rome with King Alaric of the Visigoths or have a think with Auguste Rodin! Let the sparks fly with Michael Faraday or go down to the crossroads with Robert Johnson! And witness the fulfillment of the prophecy regarding the Triple Nonfat Double Bacon Five-Cheese Mocha, wherein a man in white with poor eyesight will craft a liquid paradox…!

Oberon’s Bathtime Stories are a wonderful addition to (or entry into) the Iron Druid Chronicles. 

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Writing short stories as serial fiction is fun.

Short stories are usually one-off enterprises that show up in magazines or anthologies, but these stories were written once per month in 2024 for my newsletter subscribers, and while each is self-contained, there was also an opportunity to develop a bit of a story arc across several of them that allowed me to finish a piece of esoterica from the Iron Druid Chronicles. In book 3, Hammered, Oberon briefly mentions to Atticus that one day a man will emerge from a secret lab near Seattle with a liquid paradox: the Triple Nonfat Double Bacon Five-Cheese Mocha. Atticus is quickly distracted and the matter is dropped, seemingly forever—there really wasn’t a way for me to revisit it because circling back would do nothing to move the plot forward or develop a character. But as a short story, revisiting that prophecy was tremendously entertaining for me, and it did afford the chance to develop some things once it was located outside of the novels. I’m writing stories again this year but focusing this time on the Druids and a character from the Ink & Sigil series, Gladys Who Has Seen Some Shite, rather than Oberon. All of the stories take place chronologically after the novels, so it does feel like serial fiction.

Empires rise and fall over groceries.

A large part of the joy in writing a character who’s two thousand years old is figuring out where he was and what he was doing throughout history. Since the Druids were wiped out by the Romans, for example, he’d have a huge beef with them, and might be interested in the downfall of Rome. The research for the second story, “The Grocery Sack of Rome,” taught me that the Visigoths were just trying to grow some food, but they were squeezed between the Romans and the Huns, never left in peace, so they had to do something. Sacking Rome worked out for the short term, but it still didn’t give them a land to settle and prosper. They wound up heading to modern-day Spain, gradually morphing and blending with other tribes into the Spanish, and they became a colonial power centuries later—expanding and exploiting (or stealing) resources just as the Romans did, but with bonus religious fervor. It gave me some insight into why men supposedly think about Rome so often. The legacies (and consequences) of that empire are still around today.

History classes leave out the coolest stuff.

While researching the last story in the collection regarding Francisco de Miranda, I became a bit miffed that I’d never heard of him before, because he lived one heck of an interesting life. He dodged the Spanish Inquisition over and over—they wanted him bad—and then he dodged the guillotine during the French Revolution twice. He tried to invade Venezuela to overthrow the Spanish colonial government with like two boats and a handful of dudes, indicating he had a gigantic pair of cojones, but when that didn’t work out, he became the president of the First Republic a bit later and got to use the flag that he’d come up with during the invasion. But it was just one adventure after another with this guy. He liberated the Bahamas during the American Revolution. An empress took him as a lover (Catherine the Great). At the end, he was betrayed by a friend and handed over to the Spanish after he’d dodged them for so long. The guy’s life was a series of action films and yet I’d never heard of him. History textbooks need to do better.

Political science kinda nailed it though.

Back in this whole other century, when I was in college pursuing one of those liberal arts degrees, I took an introductory class where one of the texts was Long Cycles in World Politics by George Modelski. It basically laid out the argument, looking at history, that hegemonic powers like the United States come and go, and judging by the signals—signals we picked up by looking first at The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon—the United States was on its decline and would be giving way to some other hegemonic power in the decades ahead. That was in the early nineties, and speculation abounded: Who would rise to be the new hegemon of the next cycle? Nobody really thought it would be the USSR—they had just shat the bed with Chernobyl and the Berlin Wall crumbled soon afterward. Smart money was on China or Japan. And now…here we are, witnessing the end of America’s global leadership, and it’s pretty clear that China is positioned to lead. In an attempt to address the cycle, I wrote “A Riotous Distraction,” set in September of 1922, the time of The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about the immense carelessness of the rich and warned us about them, but in spite of everyone reading it (or maybe twenty percent of everyone because we know lots of folks never did the assigned reading), we let the wealth disparities grow and grow until we have a whole bunch of Tom and Daisy Buchanans now, smashing lives with their casual cruelties and heading to the golf course or sailing away on their yachts. The orcas know what’s up and they’re trying to help, but they can’t save us.

Stories help us process and cope.

Whether it’s reading them or writing them, I take comfort in stories set in various historical periods because people have been enduring (and triumphing over) one kind of nonsense or another for centuries. Writing these stories that spanned history from the Roman empire to the 1970s showed me that people have been surviving and thriving in every era, despite their circumstances, and it helped me manage my angst about the future throughout 2024. Writing and reading them this year is practically necessary to function. And I’m finding that short stories are perfect when my attention span is under assault by the news. These twelve stories—all frame stories where Oberon introduces the bathtime story Atticus tells him—actually work great as bedtime stories (I’ve heard from early readers). I hope you will enjoy, stay hydrated, get enough sleep, and defy fascism.

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Kevin Hearne hugs trees, pets doggies, and rocks out to heavy metal. He also thinks tacos are a pretty nifty idea. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling series the Iron Druid Chronicles, the Seven Kennings trilogy that begins with A PLAGUE OF GIANTS, and co-author of the Tales of Pell with Delilah S. Dawson.

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(Oberon’s Bathtime Stories is also available on the billionaire’s site but I’m not going to link to a damn billionaire.)

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Forty-five-year-old Imogen has always struggled to fit in, never finding her passion in life. And while that may include having cold feet in her impending nuptials, that doesn’t mean she’s ready to ditch planet Earth—and her entire life—completely.

When Imogen is kidnapped by an alien prince in disguise, there’s nothing she can do to stop him. He’s sidhe—a being with powerful abilities—and he’s grown up used to getting what he wants. The prince is convinced Imogen will fall in love with him, and that her new powers, once she’s turned sidhe, will help his country win a centuries-old feud.

With the help of the prince’s much more tolerable brother, Imogen starts to get her feet back under her, but even he can’t protect her from those who would use her for her powers. If Imogen can’t find a way to fight for herself, she’ll become a pawn in a world that has already decided what she’s going to be.

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As cool as it might seem, getting abducted from Earth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

I did an ARC giveaway for A Dagger of Lightning recently. To enter, you had to answer one question, “Would you like to be kidnapped from Earth?” The overwhelming response was, “Yes, get me out of here.” However, my protagonist, Imogen can tell you, it’s anything but fun. Her autonomy is completely stripped, for one. She doesn’t get to say goodbye, her entire family likely assumes the worst, and the alien prince who kidnapped her keeps blithely reassuring her that she’ll get over it. Not to mention, the country he’s at odds with keeps trying to abduct her for their own purposes. Fortunately, his more empathetic brother is around to help her get her footing.

People are actually really interested in a middle-aged “chosen one.”

When I first got the idea for Dagger, I was concerned that no one would be interested in an older protagonist, but I couldn’t stop writing it. I finally showed the first few pages to a friend, eliciting promises of honesty if this concept was a waste of time. “It’s not stupid. I think you should write it,” she said. I wrote the first draft in twenty-eight days, which is insane and has never happened again. Of course, there were a lot of beta reads and rewrites over the years before it sold. One thing remained consistent, however, people loved a fierce, fully-adult woman main character. The early reviews have also been overwhelmingly positive in this regard.

Coming of age stories don’t have an age limit.

Not one aspect of a person freezes the moment they turn twenty-one. At least it shouldn’t. Personal growth should be continuous. I have reinvented myself professionally at least four times during my life, and I’ve experienced my share of internal growth spurts as well. Creating Imogen as she learns to fight for what she wants while slowly allowing herself to become emotionally vulnerable was one of the best parts of writing this book.

Sometimes not getting what you want is the best thing for you.

In the beginning, all Imogen wants is to get back to her life on Earth. Although change is foisted upon her in the worst way possible, she finds something worth fighting for in her new life and grows in ways she never would have on Earth. Likewise, A Dagger of Lightning grew in spite of my frustration—I wanted the book to sell right away—I continued to rewrite Dagger after each failed pitch. The book that comes into the world on April 1st is the same at its core, but it is so much more vibrant and nuanced than the original inception. Just as Imogen fails to get what she initially wanted so desperately; each rejection pushed me to make this book the best version of itself.

It’s okay to have fun.

Coming off my first book, Ghost Tamer—where, yes, there is humor, but it’s inserted intentionally to offset the exploration of grief, loss, and moving on—writing A Dagger of Lightning was honestly a joy. When I started writing, my intention was merely to explore what it would be like to be yanked from mortality and a normal life at middle age, I didn’t have any intentions to go deeper. The comments on misogyny, friendship, self-growth and so on emerged on their own. Mostly, I just wanted to have a good time and I think readers want that, too. But we can have a good time while raging against misogyny and the abuse of privilege. Part of the reader’s catharsis is watching Imogen establish a sense of self while fighting against a system that wants to use her and force her submission. Just like in life, the fight isn’t over with the final pages, there’s always room to grow and more battles to win.

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Meredith grew up in New Orleans, collecting two degrees from Louisiana State University before running away to Chicago to be an actor. In between plays, she got her black belt and made martial arts and yoga her full-time day job. She fought in the Chicago Golden Gloves, ran the Chicago Marathon, and competed for team USA in the Savate World Championships in Paris. In spite of doing each of these things twice, she couldn’t stay warm and relocated to Nashville. She owns several swords, but lives a non-violent life, saving all swashbuckling for the page, knitting scarves, gardening, visiting coffee shops, and cuddling with her husband and two panther-sized cats. Her first novel Ghost Tamer is an Amazon Editor’s Pick for Best SciFi Fantasy, an IBPA Benjamin Franklin Gold Winner for Best SciFi Fantasy, an IPPY Award Winner for Best First Book, and a Silver Falchion Winner for Best Book of 2023 and Best Supernatural. A Dagger of Lighting releases April 1, 2025, both with CamCat Books.

Meredith Lyons: Website | Instagram | Threads

A Dagger of Lightning: Bookshop.org | Camcat Books