It is, I think, the sensation of a phantom limb: it itches, the limb that doesn’t exist anymore, and so I want to scratch it even though nothing will ever satisfy or resolve that sensation. It’s like how I sometimes want to call one of my parents even though moments later I am reminded, “That’s right, they’re both dead.” This is Twitter for me at this point. It’s a severed limb, a dead place, a broken tooth, and yet the old urge to poke at it remains present. So I go over there, even though I’m mostly gone from it, and I rubberneck — and oh boy, there’s always something to rubberneck. Twitter right now is a live camera feed watching a highway in an ice storm — you tune in and watch car crash after car crash, the constant shriek of metal, the spinning out of vehicles, carfires burning effulgent in the whiteout blizzard, and when you get a clear moment, when you squint, you realize every last one of those burning cars is a fucking Tesla.

I don’t need to regale the entire stretch of the Musky Reign so far, but the short and sweet is, a billionaire narcissist with skin thinner than shaved prosciutto stretched precariously over a honeydew melon is, nearly every hour of every day, cocainedly shoving more and more of Twitter into the shit-tubes. He’s re-platforming Nazis. He’s de-platforming journalists. He’s replying to every Arkham Asylum villain as if they’re serious pundits and thinkers. He’s winking at Q-Anon. And that’s just in the last few fucking days.

It isn’t going great.

It’s also hella glitchy. And bots are having a field day. I’ve gotten promoted tweets from accounts that are clearly faking real businesses — I saw on from a Dr. Marty’s Pet Food that had 1 follower, and was pretending to sell the dog food but leading you to a janky, insecure link that was absolutely not the website of that company, nor was it from the Twitter account of that company. Not that blue-checks even matter anymore, because you can buy one for a back alley handjob. Plus, Twitter is forcing me to see Tesla tweets and Musk tweets — I don’t get them as promoted tweets. I get them just in my feed, as if I follow those accounts, which I most certainly do not. Hell, I blocked Musk — and mysteriously, he’s unblocked, now. What fun.

Twitter is no longer working as intended. Maybe it’s working as intended for him, though even there, I’m dubious. (His tantrum last night in Twitter Spaces — before he swiftly deleted all of Twitter Spaces — is telling.)

Like Tesla stock, and arguably like the cars themselves, he’s crashing and burning the whole thing. Maybe on purpose. I dunno. Probably to some degree on purpose, though I don’t know that he knows he’s crashing it and letting it burn. Part of me thinks he’s simply following his egomaniacal urges and trying to apply autocratic control over any space online that has ever been mean to him. A user suggested he buy Substack to control the “narrative layer” of the Internet, and he said he was open to the idea, because really, that’s what he wants. He wants to control the flow of information, and will make lots of lofty proclamations about free speech and both sides and wank-wank-wank, but really he just wants to make sure you’re not being mean to him or telling people where his plane has flown recently. It is deeply pathetic. We should expect his $99 NFT collection in short order.

And all of this would be fun to watch if he weren’t also using it to shield himself in a ring of Neo-Nazis and insurrectionists and *-gater types. He’s invited every Wormtongue in the digital kingdom to whisper in his ear, and he’s listening. And he’s using it to elevate antisemitism, transphobia, crusades against his enemies, and so on. Which means the longer we stay there, the more we are also helping to elevate it, because at the end of the day, Twitter is a platform that relies on advertising. And advertising will be propped up by numbers, and those numbers are not just about users, but about user engagement. So, if we’re over there engaging wildly and wantonly, over time that’s going to give cover to advertisers to come back. And it’ll be difficult to say to, f’rex, Apple, “Hey, are you sure you want your advertising next to all this bigotry?” while also tweeting from the very stage that is centering that bigotry. All our tweets are advertising, in a sense, and so one wonders if it’s really fair to ask advertisers to stop using the site if we cannot commit to the same.

As noted before, I understand the impulse to think you can somehow claim Twitter is “ours” and rah-rah-rah, we will defend our communities and fight Musk on the digital beaches, but they’re his digital beaches, your tweets are his tweets, he has the whole thing. It’s a private company and he mostly likes that you’re mad because it creates engagement. And engagement makes money.

I don’t begrudge folks for not leaving. As noted, I’m still technically there, and I don’t intend to delete. We have communities there, and for artists and authors and such, it’s a place we’ve long used to try to peddle the weird things we’ve made, and losing that is a very serious loss. So, there’s no harm or foul in continuing to be there, but I do think we are at the point you need to vigorously be planning your escape vector and eyeing that Eject Button. I’ll continue to RT anti-Muskian stuff because, fuck that fucking guy. I’ll continue to try to use the site as a loose and shallow vector for promotion and signal boosting other good books and such. But beyond that I’m not going to use it to provide quote-unquote CONTENT. I’m not looking for virality or deep thoughts and I’m not gonna post photos or anything anymore. My usage there continues to dwindle and I hope you see you all elsewhere in the grand cyber-veldt.

(Failing all else, maybe I’ll just buy a phone line and start a BBS. Start that sweet, sweet SysOp life once more, baby. Woo! Retro! Lo-fi internet!)

Hive Social is back up, apparently resolving some janky security issues. I do not vouch for it or its security, but I’ll use it because, I dunno, I have to try something and for all its jank, I still like it. (Note, it’s app only, no desktop. Requires a new update to use.)

I’m at Post, too, @chuckwendig there. (Desktop only, no app.)

Of course, Instagram, @chuck_wendig.

Mastodon, sure, I’m there riding the elephant, @chuckwendig at mastodon dot social, link here.

Exodus and exile continues.

See you on the spiderwebs, frandos.

If you are at all like me, time means nothing anymore. The pandemic has broken any and all sense of temporal flow I once had. My wife likens it to defragging a hard drive — the pandemic was such an erratic time that our brains defragged, moving all the relevant chunks together and largely ignoring the chunks where either nothing happened or where it contains stuff we wanna forget, which frees up a lot of space. Great, except? That space is a void of slippery timelessness.

So, trying to remember THINGS THAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR IN PARTICULAR is tough. Especially when it comes to remembering what I liked, read, listened to, and the like. Triply so when it comes to thinking about books that I read, because I also read a lot of books that aren’t out yet, or read 2022 releases in 2021, and as such, wires get crossed.

Meaning, I’m going to miss some stuff here. And I apologize for that.

BUT!

Still.

I saw stuff, I read stuff, I heard stuff, and a lot of stuff was good, so I figure I’ll make the valiant-if-completely-destined-to-fail effort to put some of that stuff in front of you.

Here, then, is a short, non-comprehensive, non-exhaustive list of COOL STUFF.

Books

aka, THE MOST IMPORTANT SECTION BECAUSE BOOKS ARE GOOD

I don’t read as much as I used to, in part because I don’t have the time, and my eyes get tired, and I also read a lot slower than I used to. Which lets me savor work more but also, just not read as much, which sucks a bit.

Still.

Here are some of the very cool books I read and liked this year.

Books

HIDE, Kiersten White (tense thriller, twisted American fable, true fave here)

MAYBE WE’LL MAKE IT, Margo Price (music memoir, anybody creative should read this, all about the love of the things you make and do)

THE VIOLENCE, Delilah S. Dawson (holy shit what the fuck, this book is a whole damn journey, don’t be turned away by the pandemic side of it)

THE PALLBEARER’S CLUB, Paul Tremblay (softer touch Tremblay, sweeter and funnier but he’s still gonna stick that knife in because Paul is a monster)

THE DEVIL TAKES YOU HOME, Gabino Iglesias (let’s just call this what it is: a real bolt-cutter of a book, it’ll gut you, IYKYK)

AN IMMENSE WORLD, Ed Yong (one of our greatest science writers, will make you really appreciate the animal world and why we need to protect it)

GHOST EATERS, Clay McLeod Chapman (my highest compliment is that it reminds me of playing World of Darkness games, and this vibes like a truly legendary Wraith: the Oblivion or Geist game)

THE FERVOR, Alma Katsu (haunting historical horror, written with elegant prose and heartbreaking vibes)

NO GODS FOR DROWNING, Hailey Piper (horror noir fantasy all rolled up in one, vibed kinda like ARCANE on Netflix a little but definitely bloodier, good stuff)

THE TREES GREW BECAUSE I BLED THERE, Eric LaRocca (I wrote the intro to this, suffice to say this is body horror that slides between your ribs)

THE HOLLOW KIND, Andy Davidson (creeping crawling roots-and-shoots mom-and-son-move-into-old-family-house story, goes places you don’t expect)

MARY, Nat Cassidy (spooky serial killery middle-age ladyey stuff, prose pops and the hook sinks in right from the first page)

THE CLACKITY, Lora Senf (middle grade, more serial killery fun, but also monstrous and creepy and really shows how far you can push MG horror)

BURNING QUESTIONS, Margaret Atwood (I mean, c’mon)

THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF APPLES IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA, Daniel Bussey (yes I bought a seven-volume apple encyclopedia, you shut your goddamn mouth and don’t judge me)

Also a lot of books that came out in 2021 or before like Mallory O’Meara’s fantastic GIRL DRINKS or Christopher Mims’ ARRIVING TODAY or Matt Siegel’s SECRET HISTORY OF FOOD. Plus I blurbed stuff that isn’t coming out until 2023 like Grady Hendrix’s horror-humor-heart trifecta of HOW TO SELL A HAUNTED HOUSE or the classic-feeling horror of Chris Goldens ALL HALLOW’S EVE or Eric LaRocca’s debut novel or Jaime Green’s non-fict THE POSSIBILITY OF LIFE. And again I’m sure there’s shit-tons of stuff I’m missing.

Finally, I just started WHITE HORSE by Erika Wurth, and so far it’s a thumb’s UP.

[EDITED TO ADD: Not sure how I forgot Catriona Ward’s SUNDIAL — I think I read it in 2021, which may explain it. But also, time is meaningless. It’s exceptional — twisted, with an emphasis on the twist. I loved NEEDLESS STREET but thought SUNDIAL was even better, and it really blew me away.]

Movies

Everything Everywhere All At Once, Nope, X, The Adam Project, Confess Fletch, Top Gun Maverick, Barbarian, Emily the Criminal, Prey, Black Phone, Hellraiser

TV Shows

White Lotus, Severance, Andor, What We Do In The Shadows, Yellowjackets, Peacemaker, Bad Sisters, Reboot, Stranger Things

(I’m behind on some great shows, too, like Better Call Saul, Abbot Elementary, Russian Doll, Reservation Dogs)

Music

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Cool It Down

Metric, Formentera

K. Flay, Inside Voices / Outside Voices

The Linda Lindas, Growing Up

Oceanator, Nothing’s Ever Fine

Mitski, Laurel Hell

Alice Merton, S I D E S

Winnetka Bowling League, Pulp EP

Jack White, Entering Heaven Alive

Games

Inscryption (PS5), Stray, Cult of the Lamb, Vampire Survivors, Elden Ring, Beacon Pines, Goat Simulator 3, and also I got a Steam Deck and damn if that isn’t a pretty nifty device.

ANYWAY!

Thassit.

What did you like this year? Drop in the comments, recommend something. Anything! Across these categories or… like, literally anything, I don’t care, go hog-wild, get crazy, YOU ARE BOUND BY NO MORTAL LAW

So, as noted in an earlier post, I just didn’t have time to put together a gift guide for 2022, but then friend and author and possible hallucination Melissa F. Olson was like HELL NO YOU AREN’T GETTING AWAY THAT EASY, WENDIG, and I was like, whoa, aggressive, Melissa, also how did you get in my pantry? And she was like HERE IS A GIFT GUIDE YOU WILL POST THIS OR I WILL TAKE OFF YOUR OTHER THUMB, and I like that thumb? So I’m posting this. Please take her seriously. Even if she’s a hallucination, she’s very dangerous!

***

Hello, friends, I’m Melissa F. Olson, urban fantasy author and longtime blah blah blah you can read my bio at the end, let’s get to the presents.

So you need a last-minute gift for the writer in your life…or, you ARE the writer in your life, and you don’t know what to put on your wish list, and you’re a little tired of receiving decent pens and a bunch of those fancy notebooks that you’ll never actually write in because they seem way too pretty to fill with the spidery dregs of the inside of your skull. Relatable!

I, a longtime devotee of Chuck’s annual Gifts For Writers List, am here to help. As your new, only slightly unhinged personal shopper, let me present some last-minute items you can still get in time for Christmas:

Bath Crayons

Ooh, it seems weird right off the bat, but hear me out: Writers famously get ideas when it’s very inconvenient to write them down: while driving, in the shower, when we’re just about to fall asleep, etc (Chuck, insert something sciency about the brain relaxing here, okay, I can’t be bothered to Google). Now, you CAN buy fancy waterproof paper and pens that go in the shower, but it’s way more fun to spend $6 on bath crayons. Use the shower walls to jot down ideas, inspirational quotes, to-do list, whatever, and when you’re ready you can erase it with your hand and a little water.

(Bonus: when I’m on deadline, I often use my crayon to make a note of the day I last washed my hair, because Deadline Melissa is sloppy as hell.)

Hand Helpers

Let’s take care of our tools, shall we? No, not the brain, there are drugs for that; I’m talking about your hands. Chuck loves to recommend fancy-pants pens…and I admit, I absolutely love the Baron Fig Squire, which I first learned about on his 2019 gift list. But if you write a lot, or if, like me, you have issues with arthritis or other hand problems, putting a grip on that sucker is a life-saver (well, it’s a hand-saver, but we’re writers who bring actual imaginary WORLDS to LIFE, so by the transitive property of–you know what, you get it).

I like having this squishy purple thingy on my Squire, but there are dozens of options available for the pen of your choice. Perhaps you can make a little sample set (a “flight of grips,” if you will) for your writer to try out. It’s a nice way to show that you care about them and their ability to grip things going forward. You can also just buy the Super Big Fat Pen, which comes on a lanyard, although it’s not the delightful rollerball experience of a refillable pen. Warning: Do not let the Big Fat Pen fall into the hands of toddlers. They will LOVE that grip and your walls will not love you.

Here’s another great way to take care of hands: Chuck has mentioned fingerless gloves AND fun book clothing before, but it took me, the next generation apprentice Sith gift list writer, to bring together this thought masterpiece: the Storiarts fingerless gloves. Unlike CHUCK’S recommendation, these gloves are made from a lightweight, jersey-type material, so they keep your hands warm from freezing cold laptop metal without overheating or getting in the way of the ole typity-type. Plus they come with actual words from any number of great works of literature, so you can glance down if you feel you’re getting a little too full of yourself. (I’ve got Dracula, but I’ve been eyeing Frankenstein so I can run around wearing one of each.) Storiarts also has, I don’t know, scarves and blankets and shit, but the gloves are the coolest product.

On-the-Go Aids

Writers are often a nomadic workforce: those of us who can’t afford swanky work sheds tend to set up shop at libraries, coffee shops, cafes, etc, like pale, lonely word-nerds questing for social recognition and/or working in the car while we wait around to pick up children. I bought this Sonic Standing Pen Case several years ago, and I love it so much, I want it buried with me when I die (just kidding–we’re going to be cremated together). It’s a pencil bag that you can unzip and flip open to stand up as a pencil cup. When you’re done working, or you need to pack up and sprint to the Starbucks bathroom, just flip and zip and throw it in your laptop bag.

Another great on-the-go helper is a decent lap desk. The one I use is a little pricy at $55, but I’ve had it for over two years and it looks fresh out of the box, despite floating around my chaos habitat being used as a fast food tray, child art creator, pillow fight shield, etc. I bring it with me on long car trips (in which I am NOT driving) and curl up with it on the couch when I don’t feel like sitting at my desk. Actually, as I’m reading this back I realize that the lap desk and I may have a Relationship, and you know what, I’m okay with that.

CHUCK SAYS I GET TO SNEAK-PLUG MY BOOKS HERE

so please try one, or all, they’re delicious and — this is true — ZERO calories what a deal.

[okay as the person who runs this website I should probably also not-so-sneakily plug MY books like okay fine Damn Fine Story is probably good for writers and also there’s Wayward so that’s fun, or you could preorder my new writing book, Gentle Writing Advice, out in June, or there’s always Dust & Grim for the kids because hey kids apparently like Christmas too — cdw]

Cool-ass Lanyards

You know what us writers like to do? We convene. We convene like NOBODY’s business, at writing conferences, conventions, expos, etc. Our man Chuck convenes fairly constantly.  And when we convene, we usually have to wear badges on a lanyard around our necks –which means it’s the one thing everyone at the con has, and everyone else sees. Instead of using the crappy free lanyard that comes with convention registration, your writer could be using a cool-ass lanyard that will help them build confidence and start conversations while they strut the convention floor. Get them something that celebrates their favorite fandom, identifies them as a book nerd, or allows them to literally rappel out of a bad panel if needed. There might not be time before Christmas, but for extra gift-giving bonus points, you could even get lanyards printed with the name of their book or website.

For example, here is a picture of Chuck and me. One of us is wearing a boring freebie lanyard, and one of us got a rad lanyard printed with a bunch of her book covers. I ask you, who’s the greater success, really?

The Organised Writer by Antony Johnston

Chuck often recommends “craft books,” aka books that can help you write better, but I want to switch it up with this great volume on setting up your writing space, time, and business, written by the author of novels, comic books, and video games. (You can tell Antony is very smart and British because he spells “organized” with an “s” and just FLAUNTS it.) This book is chock-full of practical advice like how to organize paper files, run a project calendar, clear your mind before working, and so on. If you feel like your whole writing life is a slapdash attempt to peck a few words into a laptop while dashing around your house being chased by obligation to the tune of the Benny Hill theme song, this is the book to help you work that shit out.

And remember to hydrate

Chuck always goes on about coffee (too gross) and chocolate (too obvious), but you know what writers need even more universally? More water, preferably from an absolutely bitchin’ water bottle. Writers essentially have two modes: sitting at a desk all day or running around a reading/convention all day, and in both cases we definitely won’t drink enough water. If you really want to help and support your family writer, try getting them a great water bottle they can use for hot coffee OR cold water (I recommend Tervis or Hydroflask), plus a few writer-themed vinyl stickers and a bottle of Mio (Personal favorite is orange vanilla). It’s a great way to keep us alive so we can finish that next chapter.

***

Melissa F. Olson is the author of sixteen books in the Old World universe, the PI mystery The Big Keep, and numerous short stories and novellas, including the Nightshades trilogy for Tor.com. Her journalism and academic work has been published in The International Journal of Comic Art, the compilation Images of the Modern Vampire, Litreactor.com, and Tor.com, among other places.

Melissa has been a writing teacher, English professor, and TEDx presenter, but she now divides her time between writing, editing and attending the occasional convention, where she speaks about issues related to genre, feminism, disability, and parenting. Read more about her work and life at MelissaFOlson.com.

Let’s just put it out there and up front — earlier, I was glad to play around with AI art, but that has ended. I have no intention at present of mucking around with AI art, signal-boosting it, or supporting it. I had a subscription to Midjourney, and I canceled it.

Now, to rewind a little —

I think AI art is pretty cool.

I know, I know — I just said, but I won’t support it, and that’s true.

But I think it’s neat, in a general sense. It’s like, we can make COMPUTER ROBOT GHOSTS do all kinds of cool things for us — they can tell us the weather, show us how to get to the mall, I can yell at my car to turn on the heat and it’ll totally do it, Gmail can already predict the response I’m going to make and start to prep it for me. The robot ghosts are cool. So, the ability to say, HEY ROBOT GHOST, SHOW ME WEREWOLF PIKACHU USING A NEW POKEMON MOVE CALLED “CORUSCATING ELECTRIC ANUS” ON A KAIJU VERSION OF JERRY SEINFELD and then somehow it sorta does it, well, I don’t hate that.

Now, admittedly, when I started mucking about with AI art in the long-times-ago epoch of, mmm, six months ago, what it produced was often fiddly and hilarious and straight-up fucking weird. It would still have eyeballs in places where there shouldn’t be. Some guy’s face might look like a smear of paint, and his hand would have sixteen fingers. You might squint and see Sophia from the Golden Girls mysteriously hiding in the wallpaper. It felt a bit like you watching a robot dream. Like you were privy to the growth of its creative mind.

(It’s a lie, of course. There’s no robot dreaming; that is a romantic, anthropomorphic notion.)

But it didn’t take long for the results to get… good. Real good. Freaky good. You plug in something and what returns is a foursquare array of nearly exactly what you asked for, in a variety of art styles and modes. Which, one might argue, is quite the point of this whole affair, and I suppose it is, though I’ll also note for my mileage it also kinda defeats if not the point, than rather, the delight of having a robot puke up something just super fucking weird instead of precisely what you asked for. We were training the robot well. And it was learning fast.

And now, you see the so-called AI art everywhere, and you also see those who are mad at so-called AI art everywhere. And the latter category is often artists. Not always! But often enough.

As such, I’m going to side with the artists.

(Spoiler: you should always side with the artists.)

I’ll talk about why in a moment, though I will note here there is, of course, a nuanced discussion to be had here. I don’t think people using AI art are like, Cyber Hitlers or anything. I used it quite well looking for inspiration for my Evil Apples book (which has a title and I’ll soon tell you what it is, I promise), and it… actually worked, and given how many iterations it took to get that inspiration, I could not have easily paid an artist for that essentially throwaway act. I’ve seen some trans friends say that they like how some of the AI profile art makes them look and feel, and that’s pretty wonderful. I have artist friends who use it and like it and find it valuable — it is a tool to them, not a curse. Technology also tends to expedite tasks while also leaving human workers behind in ways that are sometimes good and sometimes bad and most often somewhere in the middle — the ability to have language translated for us is pretty useful in a broadly human sense, even as it puts actual translators out of work. And finally, I think we as people seize on beautiful things and weird things and odd memes, and AI art allows us to do all of that, allowing us to play and explore and just be inspired in weird ways. And connect with each other as we do so.

But, but, but.

But.

BUT.

I’m still saying, let’s cool it on the AI art.

And here’s why.

1. First, just watch Charlotte’s video here. It covers a lot of things I’d say, except smarter and cooler because she is smarter and cooler than I am.

2. It is demoralizing for young artists. Trust me when I tell you, it’s hard to muster the interest in making new art when you can poke a computer to do it for you with a sentence or three. Yes, there remains value in art for art’s sake, but I think if you were a young artist viewing a future in Making Art, this is definitely going to give you pause. Again, I know this because I’ve seen this exact feeling emerge. Now, once more, I know there is nuance to all of this — I’m sure professional photographers winced when every jabroni got a digital camera and could take 40,000 photos in a weekend. I’ve no doubt that musicians of a certain age felt like I DON’T LIKE THAT THESE YOUNG KIDS TODAY CAN JUST TAP BUTTONS AND MAKE SOME BEEP-BOOP MUSIC ON THEIR SYNTHESCISSORS. But I also note that AI art isn’t that. Digital photography is still photography. Electronic music is still music. AI art… well, this leads me to the next point.

3. No, this doesn’t make you an artist and I’m seeing way too many defenders of AI art take this line. Some stay back at the line of, “I’m now an art director, art-directing a robot,” which, ennnh. Okay? But some march full on ahead and are saying, hey, I’m an artist now too. Which… nnnghhhh, are you? I admit, this gives me a pit in my stomach because I don’t like telling people what art is or is not and what makes an artist. That kind of gatekeeping curdles my milk more than a little. Still, as someone who has used Midjourney and other AI art makers, I sure don’t think of myself as an artist. If anything, I was just a writer jamming ideas into a techbro’s art engine. I didn’t feel like an artist. I sure wouldn’t call myself an artist having used Midjourney. I guess if I was using it to generate images that I then sketched or manipulated, that counts — but to do that, I’d still have to feed the beast, and therein lies part of the problem.

4. Feeding the beast means feeding an engine that feeds techbros and not artists. That’s the heart of the problem, really. Artists are like dinosaurs getting mulched into oil to fuel this thing. And you can see it when the AI art reproduces material with artifacts of signatures and watermarks. It’s clearly harvesting pre-existing art. It’s not dreaming up new art. It’s using their art, human art, and nobody is getting compensated, nobody is getting their due for being the literal seed-bed for this entire thing. The only people compensated are tech people. The people who make the engine. They’re the ones glad to press the oil out of the artists to run the machine.

5. No, this isn’t the same thing as “being inspired by artists.” That’s one of the lines of argument that doesn’t well with me. “It’s not copying artists, it’s being inspired by them, same as a person would be.” Except it’s not that, and you know it’s not that. We’ve fallen for the same anthropomorphic bullshit I spewed above about this being some PRECIOUS ROBOT DREAMING, and AWWW SEE THE ART-BOT IS INSPIRED BY YOU, but that’s not what it is. It’s not sentient. It’s not alive. It’s not a person making artistic decisions. It’s software operating on algorithmic decisions driven by, again, engines of tech, not creatures of art. “But it’s just like Andy Warhol!” No it’s jolly well fucking not. And you know that. You know Andy Warhol was a person who, like him or not, made decisions about what images he used, how he would subvert them, how that would put the work in front of other humans. He was a human making human art from corporate material in order to affect other humans.

6. And of course some people are choosing this as a battleground to litigate the problems with our current copyright system. Look, we’re all out here making choices and sometimes those choices are choices that benefit our urges and interests rather than helping out the greater good, right? From water bottles to Spotify to this or that, we are morally compromised daily because it is difficult to get a clean 100% record on Best Human Practices. But there’s a special kind of person who then justifies their choices with a lot of bluster about how REALLY they’re actually doing the RIGHT THING — “I voted for Jill Stein because something-something third-parties.” And you’re seeing it now with this AI art thing. “Well, copyright in America is poisonous and we have to Defeat Capitalism and really artists should be paid a Universal Basic Income,” and yeah, okay, good point, except that’s not a thing right now and this certainly won’t make it a thing. Yes, copyright has its problems, but that doesn’t mean you should hand it over to a tech company to do with as they see fit. Yes, capitalism is fraught and fucked up but paying an AI art subscription isn’t you throwing a Molotov cocktail through a bank window. Artists are already people on the fringes and they deserve to be paid for their efforts. They deserve to eat. To pay rent. To buy cool things. Hell, I’d much rather an artist get rich than Tech Bro #483, okay?

7. There is an adjacency (is that a word? too late) to NFT/crypto culture that I find… off-putting. There’s an NFT publishing company which, I’ll be honest, seems super fucking scammy to me, and most of their Very Special Super Rare Non-Fungible Book Cover Tokens are… just random AI art. Ennh. Ugh. Yuck.

8. Finally, the biggest reason of all: because more artists are asking us to leave AI art behind. I dunno. I’m not an artist. So Imma listen to them when I can.

So, anyway, them’s my thoughts. I suspect (or at least, hope) this AI art thing burns out. I think we should share actual human art. No, I don’t think you’re Il Monstre for using AI art. I think artists should be compensated. It’s the holidays, buy their prints, commission them to do something cool, whatever. We humans are why the human experience matters. Side with WONDERFUL MEATBAG ARTISTS, not TECH BRO MAGPIES. Okay? Okay.

(And yes, I recognize they’re coming for writers, too. Our off-ramp is a few miles down the road yet, but the car is speeding up, not slowing down.)

And speaking of writers —

Hey, Wayward is out if you want a cool GIFTY BOOK THING for folks. (And curiously, it’s a book that has a lot of thoughts about artificial intelligence!)

Cut off date for ordering signed, personalized books of mine from Doylestown Bookshop is, I believe, end of day 12/12, so hop to it if that’s what you want.

And if you liked it, please talk about it, yell about it, shake people and demand they buy it, that sort of thing. Word-of-mouth is the most vital resource we have, and in this era of fracturing social media, it counts double, even triple.

I’m currently dialed back on Twitter (and locked down too), so I may not see stuff over there quickly, and if you’d care to share this there, that’s a-okay by me. (Twitter: another one of those questionable things these days. I’ve more thinking to do about that place, but for now, I’m busy with book edits and will take the break until after the holidays.)

Also, finally, for those looking to see me at the Bethlehem/Easton B&N this weekend — we’re going to reschedule it. Lot of illness going around (including in our own house), so feels like it’s best to maybe kick that can to after the holidays. Look for a rescheduling of that event into Jan or Feb!

I get emails. Realistically, I’ve been getting a certain kind of email since around, ohh, March of 2020, which often wants to dance around the question — or ask it directly — of whether or not I *booming voice* PREDICTED THE FUTURE. After all, in Wanderers, out in 2019, I wrote about a global pandemic that comes from bats that releases in a contentious election year during the rise of Christofascist white nationalism aaaand, well, yeah. Obviously, this isn’t the goal. I’m not setting out to predict the future, despite, um, also predicting Elon Musk was gonna be a bad guy (see: Invasive, 2017). Rather, I’m trying to talk about the present, hoping to contextualize what’s going on around me and, even more myopically, in my own crazy head. Like, I got anxieties, and I’m gonna put them on each page like a smashed butterfly.

Wayward is, of course, not a book I really intend to be itself a predictive engine either, despite one of its characters being a predictive intelligence called Black Swan. Still, I get a lot of questions over email — or at the book events I’ve done recently — and I thought, hey, why not talk about some of this stuff. Questions not just about the prediction stuff but about the book in general.

So, let’s do this.

Chuck, what the fuck did you unleash this time??

I have no idea. I will say that this book contains very little Actual Fucking Pandemic. It is not fresh pandemic. It is old, now-finished pandemic. It’s the world thereafter. (Five years after, actually.)

In fact, this book is way more about the plague of artificial intelligence rather than the plague of, um, plague. The virus isn’t a virus. It’s what can be wrought by artificial intelligence when it’s allowed to go unchecked, for better or for worse. Thankfully, I don’t think this will really be a big thing in the news —

*checks news*

Uhhh

*quickly closes news*

*checks social media*

Uhhhhhhh

*shuts down computer, throws it into the yard, lets the rain kill it*

Goddamnit, Wendig. What sentient machine hell did you set upon us?

Nothing, obviously — even in Wanderers, it was clear they were training Black Swan on making content (the book contains recipes and poems and such), which is not a notion I made up, obviously, and in fact, the expert in talking about such things is easily Janelle Shane, whose book You Look Like A Thing And I Love You is a wonderfully weird examination of this. So, I know right now it’s a bit of a boilover in terms of OH MY GOD ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS MAKING SORTA GOOD CONTENT NOW OH GOD OH SHIT, and I think that fear is (somewhat) warranted and I think it’s very important to have these conversations but I am definitely not having that conversation right now.

(I note though I’ve stopped using the AI Art generators for a whole host of reasons. That I’ll talk about soon enough.)

Definitely don’t go read this story about Loab, the creepy woman haunting the art made by artificial intelligence, though. I warned you. Don’t click it.

(You clicked it, didn’t you.)

Can’t you just write a book about puppies and save us all the hassle?

That has been the joke, quite often, and it’s why I put a dog in Wayward. A golden retriever. Gumball, the Very Good Boy.

Oh god, you kill the dog don’t you.

At present, there is no entry for Wayward at the vital online resource, Does The Dog Die, but certainly someone here could feel free to add one.

But, since you probably wanna know now —

Here’s the answer in ROT13 cipher.

Thzonyy gur Irel Tbbq Obl qbrf abg va snpg qvr, naq ur fheivirf gur obbx vagnpg. Ohg, yvxr nyy punenpgref va guvf obbx, Thzonyy qrsvavgryl tbrf guebhtu fbzr fuvg. Fbzr erny rzbgvbany fuvg. Ohg ur’f svar ng gur raq.

Plug that in at ROT13.com and you’re good to go.

I note the book is actually very animal-heavy. Which, I think, makes a sort of sense: as humanity has waned, the wild rises back up. Plus, I’m fundamentally lazy and greedy as a writer and I love to use things that interest me and delight me, so putting in foxes and wolves and other such critters is fun for me. It’s why the book contains so much rock-and-roll too. References and such. Hell, Dolly Parton is a character in the book. Sorta.

You leave Dolly Parton alone, you monster!

That’s not a question, but I’ll answer it anyway. She’s not a huge character in the book and it’s more that there are stories about Dolly Parton in the book told by another character. It’s that she has survived the end of the world and is still out there, Doing Good Things, and also, she’s Fighting Apocalypse Nazis in her own very Dolly Parton way, and I had a lot of fun writing that.

Though I also note there’s a whole bit in there about her and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame which was also news recently, so. Um. Yeah. Oops?

Don’t lie. Is this book just really depressing? It’s about the end of the world after a global pandemic, for shit’s sake. Is it just an 800-page journey through the streets of Bummertown?

It sounds like it would be. Apocalyptic novels can be, of course. You read Cormac’s THE ROAD and ha ha, wow, that still lives on in some dark untouchable place inside of my soul. It’s like a tumor they can’t excise. Wonderful book, but that one hurts.

I talk about this in the acknowledgments of the book, but I had a really hard time… coming to the page on this initially. I was set to write it right as the pandemic started and when I went to access this story, all that met me on the screen was a howling void. This wasn’t writer’s block in the traditional way — it wasn’t just noodling over a story problem or a lack of confidence. It was like reaching for the milk in the fridge and finding someone already drank all of it. You remember how during the pandemic sometimes something would simply be not available? Toilet paper, for instance? It was like that. I went to the Story Store and the shelves were fucking empty, oh well, go home.

I don’t know that this was depression or anxiety, precisely, either? It was a kind of creative nothingness. Later I would realize that it was like breaking a bone. We were all broken and busted, and some people were able to soldier on and use that time creatively, and some of us were not. My creative leg was broken and I needed rest, and when that rest was over, I couldn’t sprint, but had to hobble about until everything fully healed.

When it did, and I set to writing this book, I realized that my experiences with the pandemic needed to be a part of it — a lens through which to see this story. And the most vital resource was, for me, hope. Not necessarily hope in systems or hope in some larger cosmic sense but rather, hope in communities, hope in friends, hope in spaces both small and strange. And it was about joy, too. Finding it. Seizing it. Cultivating it willfully when it would not be found. Joy was like those sourdough starters we were all growing in jars — trying to find simple ways to summon joy and let it grow effervescent in whatever quantity we could manage. Then trying to let that joy feed us without killing it in turn.

(Spoiler: I ended up murdering my sourdough starter on purpose. I grew to resent it. This has nothing to do with joy, and is not a metaphor.)

So, writing Wayward was very much about having characters finding hope and joy in troubled times, and seeking new beginnings after what felt like an ending. And it’s also about… you know, the guilt that can come of that, too, of finding and experiencing joy amid tumult. But hope is a real throughline for the book. I didn’t set out to write a dire, nihilistic story. I don’t have that in me right now.

That’s not to say it’s not a book with some tough stuff going down. It is a science-fiction novel with horror as its heart, and I embrace that. I don’t think you get to have the hope and the joy without the horror in a book like this. I only want you to know that the battle is ongoing. Hope has a chance. In this book and maybe, too, outside this book, too.

Anyway. I’ll let Alex Brown’s review at Tor.com speak to some of this —

“Wayward was written, in fits and starts, during the pandemic, and it’s impossible not to see how the real world bled into the fictional one. Could Wendig have written it without the pandemic? Sure, of course. It would’ve been a great science fiction thriller with lots to say about the human condition. But this version of the story feels tangible and truthful. It doesn’t feel so much predictive like Wanderers did but more like a reckoning or a reconciliation. Like catharsis. Like understanding. It’s not just a story of what could be but of what was and is and is still to come.”

They understand the book better than maybe I even do, or did, and it’s (like their review of Wanderers) one of my favorite reviews of my books ever written. I feel very lucky to have received a review like that. And I feel very lucky that you might have picked up the book or are considering picking it up.

And here of course I note that if you’re able to share this, I’d be happy for it — I’m off Twitter through the new year, at least, and not really sure where my social media home will be besides this very blog going forward, what with Post being a bit boring, and Hive being a bit erm unstable.

If you’re looking to nab a copy of the book, you should check with your local indie bookstore, of course. I also can sign and personalize copies that can be sent to you — just buy from Doylestown Bookshop and let ’em know in the notes of the order. (Or call it in.) Bookshop.org is also a good place to nab. Your local library is also a wonderful place where the books live.

Thanks for reading.

Black Swan says, wake up.

WACKY WILD WENDIGWORLD: A new amusement park! Corkscrew through an apple on the WINDING WORM! Soar through the sky on the BIRDWATCHER EXPRESS! Test your stamina and lose your soul and RIDE THE BEARD.

I dunno. Shut up.

Let’s see. What’s going on?

This Sunday! December 4th! 3pm! I’m at Nowhere Coffee in Allentown, PA, talking to WFMZ’s Bo Koltnow about mah books (and Wayward specifically) on behalf of Let’s Play Books. Buy books. Bring books. I’ll sign books. I’ll eat books. Wait not that last one. Details here.

On Saturday December 10th, I’ll also be at B&N in Easton which is actually Bethlehem, or is it B&N Bethlehem but it’s actually Easton? I dunno. It’s in the Lehigh Valley! It’s this store right here. That’s at 1pm. Again: Wayward! Books! You! Me! Signing! Talking! Perhaps an erratic Tik-Tok dance! Wait is there a hyphen in Tik-Tok! TikTok? Fuck, I dunno. This is why Jesus invented copy editors. Which I don’t have for this blog. Shit.

Also, in addition to being a newly-minted New York Times Bestseller holy crap, Dust & Grim is on this year’s Lone Star Reading List put forth by the Texas Library Association, alongside such wonderful authors as Lora Senf, Dhonielle Clayton, Alex London, and others. Big honor, so thank you, TLA!

Finally, I remind folks that if they’re looking for signed and personalized copies of Wayward (or any of my books) and you’re not coming to the events above, Doylestown Bookshop can facilitate and have the book sent to you wherever you may be. The cut off for this is, as I’m told, December 12th!

I’m also really glad that readers seem to be digging the book. Thanks for the love over social media about it and please don’t hesitate to TELL ME MORE because your comments give me life. Also leave a review. Also buy me candy. I mean, since we’re asking for things.

Oh! Finally, this’ll I think be the first year I’m not doing a gift guide here at terribleminds? I was intending to do it this week, but I got horsekicked by a rough bout of stomach nastiness (the kind where you have to ask, “am I going to shit myself while vomiting?”) and uhhh it wasn’t super great? Plus, I’m under an ever-tightening deadline on edits for MY EVIL APPLE HORROR NOVEL (which now I think has an official title that I’ll share soon). Certainly previous gift guides are pretty solid still, honestly, and here’s the one from 2021.

ANYWAY OKAY BYE HAVE A GOOD WEEKEND, stay safe out there, seems like there’s a hundred different ways to get sick right now, including, y’know, that old chestnut, COVID-19. Try not to die! Love you! Bye!