This blog is very often me yelling at me about me, and for some reason folks actually want to tune in and listen to that. This post is no different. This post is about me as much as — if not more than — it is about you. So, please, take this in the spirit that it is intended:

Me yelling at me about me.

*clears throat*

I love my phone.

I mean, I don’t make love to it or anything, though maybe I ought to given how much time I spend with it. It’s always right there in my pocket. Near my Wendig Bits, which is a reference to my genitals, as it were, and not a darling name for a brand new breakfast cereal.

The smartphone — in this case, my iPhone — is a pretty fucking batshit gonzo amazing device. Ten years ago you could not have convinced me that we would’ve had a handheld computer tricorder motherfucker that was more powerful than the computer I had on my desk. A computer that in fact also operates as a phone, a camera, a GPS, a game console, a social antenna. You can use it to find recipes, movie times, porn, bars, porn, books, friends, fuckbuddies, bars, porn, weather, and porn. That is a fantabulous device. It’s smaller than my hand, bigger than my mouth, and it contains NEARLY ALL THE INFORMATION.

It’s wonderful.

And you need to put it down.

What I mean is, I need to put it down.

Because there is no better way to be up your own ass than to be constantly staring into the shiny glitter pit that is your handheld mobile smart-device.

The phone-makers know that. They count on it. Just as food manufacturers know that food becomes more addictive with the right ratio and release of SALT SUGAR FAT into your bloodstream, the phone-makers have their own ratio of shiny icons and satisfying dings and injections of hot social connection and constant updates and probably porn. They’re not dum-dums. They want these devices to become the center of your existence. And that’s not unreasonable. Again: my smartphone is fucking amazing. I can’t imagine what will even be around in ten years provided of course that we do not drown in our own boiling oceans by then. Our phones in ten years will probably be enslaved artificial intelligences that can fly and make frittatas and give us orgasms and I dunno probably turn into lightsabers. I’m not knocking the considerable awe your phone should inspire. They are amazeballs. They are wondernipples.

And seriously, we need to put them down.

Not all the time.

But some of the time.

Look around you most days and you will see two things:

1) The world in all its glory. You will see birds flying and squirrels fucking. You’ll see traffic and airline contrails and pretty clouds and ugly clouds. You’ll see some guy with a triangle-shaped pizza stain on his shirt as if he literally just rested the slice of pizza on his chest. You’ll see a woman with a tiny dog. You’ll see some kid picking his nose and making his sister eat it. You’ll see bees and ants and boats and baubles and trash and treasure and maybe if you look hard enough you’ll see Donald Trump’s rabid skull-merkin chasing down neighborhood cats and eating them.

2) You will also see people ignoring the world in all its glory and instead doing damage to their cervical vertebrae as they crane their heads forever downward, shoving their noses and eyeballs into their handheld mobile time-sucking dopamine-releasing endorphin-chugging devices.

Do you remember the time before phones? Sitting there in an airport or waiting for your car to get repaired — what did you do? Flip through a magazine, maybe. Or maybe you talked to someone near you. Or even better: you just fucking looked around at shit until you realized that was boring and then you crawled inside your own head for a while and just thought about stuff? Daydreaming? Zoning out with a thousand-yard-stare? Figuring out life, the universe, and everything?

Now, we go right to the phones.

Which is okay, mostly. I’m at the airport, I like that. I like having that time with social media, with friends online, with games in my pocket. I like having a book there on my iPad. But once in a while, too, I forget to charge my device and I’m left with a brick and for a few moments, I have this mad panic. “AH WHAT WILL I DO WITHOUT MY CONNECTION BASICALLY I’M AS DEAD AS THE PHONE IS HOW WILL PEOPLE KNOW WHERE I AM OR WHAT I AM DOING OR HOW WILL I KNOW WHERE THEY ARE OR WHAT THEY ARE DOING OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT hey look at that lady her hair actually looks like a well-coiffed facsimile of that big orange monster guy from Looney Tunes.” (I did not realize that character had a name: “Gossamer.”)

*flashes the MORE YOU KNOW banner across your screen*

Next thing you know, you’re off on a little mental adventure. You’re looking at things. Connecting with your own brain instead of everyone else’s. Existing in the moment rather than in a thousand other moments from a hundred other people.

But it’s hard. Isn’t it? I find it hard, anyway. Disconnecting is tough.

Just putting the phone down — it’s such a habit. Twitter. Email. Weather. Music. Everything.

It doesn’t help that the phone wants to constantly poke the button in our brain that lights up our internal switchboards — it compels us to stay, hang out a while, keep looking. You open your phone to check the weather or take a photo and suddenly there’s a Twitter notification and an e-mail ding and a note about a new unlockable in that freemium game you just downloaded. It’s digital quicksand. It’s an informational sugar rush. It is glorious. It’s like drinking from a way-too-delicious caramel firehose. And it’s too damn much.

Our smartphones are like bridges carrying us over boring moments — but sometimes those boring moments are secretly, subversively amazing all on their own. Especially for us writers and artists. Sometimes it’s our job not to dive into the device but instead to stay rooted in the world — to watch it, and then to fuck off not into a screen sometimes, but into our own head-caves to process what we see and hear and smell. Sometimes we should stop taking the bridges our devices afford us, and instead take the long way. Slink down into the gulch. Descend into the canyon of existence. Be in the corporeal world and not the digital one.

Because sometimes those bridges also carry us over other people. And vital moments with those people. I’ve been talking to people who were looking at their phone and at best it’s like talking to a distracted raccoon. At worst it’s like trying to have a conversation with a tree. “HELLO ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME, TREE.” Hell, my son the other day was like, “Daddy, put your phone down, I’m talking to you.” He was. And I didn’t even realize it. I was like, “WHO ARE YOU, SMALL PERSON, HOW DID YOU GET IN MY oh shit yeah, hey, Gerald,” and he’s like, “My name isn’t Gerald.” “Dave?” “Nope.” “Don?” “No!” “I’ll just call you NINJA ROBOT 9000,” and he was cool with that, and now I should probably try to remember his name. But until then, me and NINJA ROBOT 9000 are going to have some great adventures where I’ll be putting down my phone and paying attention to what’s-his-name as best as I jolly well can.

Which is actually my solution, I think: to be mindful of the phone and to put it down at crucial moments. No phone at meal times. No phone on walks. No phone at bedtime. No phone when I’m hanging with the tot. The phone is like booze, ice cream, TV, video games, masturbation — everything in moderation. I can’t be staring at it all the time. Some of the time: yes. It’s a great vacation and a powerful tool. I love my phone and that won’t stop. I use the king hell out of my phone and that won’t — can’t, really — stop either. But I will put it down. I have to put it down. Because what’s inside it isn’t actually the world, no matter how much it feels like it sometimes. It’s time to pay attention to what goes on beyond the borders of my device screen.

I will try to be present when the world asks that I be present.

That, I think, is my mission statement.

You don’t have to accept it as yours, of course, but if you start dicking around with your phone when I’m talking to you, I might pick up your phone and eat it. *chomp*

* * *

ZER0ES.

An Anonymous-style rabble rouser, an Arab spring hactivist, a black-hat hacker, an old-school cipherpunk, and an online troll are each offered a choice: go to prison or help protect the United States, putting their brains and skills to work for the government for one year.

But being a white-hat doesn’t always mean you work for the good guys. The would-be cyberspies discover that behind the scenes lurks a sinister NSA program, an artificial intelligence code-named Typhon, that has origins and an evolution both dangerous and disturbing. And if it’s not brought down, will soon be uncontrollable.

Coming 8/18 from Harper Voyager.

Read the first five chapters here, then pre-order from:

Doylestown Bookshop| WORD| Joseph-Beth Booksellers| Murder by the Book

Powells | Indiebound | Amazon| B&N| iBooks| Google Play| Books-a-Million

In which I ask you to RECOMMEND A BOOK.

This time, with a small caveat:

Rec a book you do not think we’ve read. A book that’s something of an underdog — a fringe case, a book you want everyone to read but none of your friends have ever actually opened.

Also, the larger caveat applies, and I wish I didn’t have to give it, buuuuut:

Do not recommend your own book.

Because ew. Why would you do that?

Share the book-love. Don’t book-masturbate on us.

Oooh, one final caveat:

Recommend one book only, please and thank you.

In just over one week (8/18), ZER0ES comes screaming out of the ether with a shrieking 2400 baud modem noise, and it crawls inside your head and uploads itself into your psyche.

*breathes into a bag*

*wobbles*

Ahem.

As such, I’ll be a little noisier that week, and I figured now would be a good time for that One Last Big-Ass News Post about the book and its launch, and remind all you crazy kids about where I’ll be supporting the book and all that good stuff.

First, where I’ll be:

8/17: Pre-launch at the Doylestown Bookshop, 6:30PM. Hometown book signings are the best. Will have early copies of the book for sale! Event page here.

8/18: Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington, KY for launch — plus fellow bad-ass authors Richard Kadrey and David Wellington. 7:00PM. Event page here.

8/20: WORD Bookstore Zer0es event with bad-ass author Daniel Jose Older. At Brooklyn store, which is really one of my favorite bookstores. Event page here.

9/4 to 9/7: Dragoncon and Decatur Book Fest in Atlanta, GA. I’m told the Dragoncon schedule is up, though I’m not sure how to find it online? I’ll be at the Decatur Book Fest on Sunday, doing an event with Richard Kadrey. Oh, and that Friday (the 4th) I’ll be doing a Star Wars: Aftermath midnight launch event at a nearby Barnes & Noble. More as I know it!

9/26: Murder By The Book in Houston, TX. Signing and talk with me, Richard Kadrey, and Beth Cato! Starts at 4:30PM. Event page here.

10/8 to 10/11: New York ComicCon — not sure of my schedule yet, but looks like I’m there!

Plus, I’ve a couple bonus events:

8/25: I’ll be at the 92Y in NYC helping Libba Bray launch her newest, Lair of Dreams.

9/2: I’ll be back at the Doylestown Bookshop helping Fran Wilde launch her debut, Updraft!

Second, some new reviews:

The Barnes & Noble book blog says lots and lots of nice things about the book in their review (“Chuck Wendig Stages A Brute-Force Attack On The Technothriller Genre“), and if I may cherry-pick a paragraph:

“Outfitted with their own specialized skills, Wendig’s hodgepodge gaggle of hackers—a social engineer, a post-punk nihilist, an international activist, an old-school coder, and a credit card scammer (who soon adopt the titular nickname for themselves) — are quickly abducted into service, and the author wastes little time getting to the meat of the story, moving at whipcrack speed as things get dangerous and dark. Sequestered at a remote government facility known as The Lodge, Wendig’s crew of anti-social misfits must learn to adapt to prison-like surroundings, get in sync with their tech-phobic handler, consider the threat of a traitor in their midst, and ultimately work together to decipher the conspiracy behind a top secret NSA program known as Typhon.

We end up reading nothing less than a man vs. machine end-of-the-world thriller, slathered with raw wit and frenetic pacing, in which renegade black hat hackers don good guy garb, reluctantly forced into battle against something very powerful and very, very evil.”

And Sci-Fi Bulletin says:

“Each new novel has seen Wendig’s talents become more finely honed, and Zer0es (the 0 in the name isn’t a misprint) is his most focused and best-written book to date… Zer0es will grab you from the first page for Chuck Wendig’s finest story so far.”

And io9 calls it one of the sci-fi/fantasy novels releasing in August that you must read, listing it alongside such amazing storytellers as NK Jemisin, John Scalzi, Lilith Saintcrow, and one of my all-time authorial idols, Robin Hobb. (/fangirlsquee)

A reminder that you can read the first four — sorry, now first five — chapters here.

And if you pre-order the book (from anywhere!), you will gain access to the first couple of chapters of MYRMIDON, my next sci-fi thriller coming from Harper Voyager. Go here to enter pre-order data and you’ll be ready to roll with even more reading material.

You an add the book on Goodreads.

And, finally, if you want to pre-order the book — well:

An Anonymous-style rabble rouser, an Arab spring hactivist, a black-hat hacker, an old-school cipherpunk, and an online troll are each offered a choice: go to prison or help protect the United States, putting their brains and skills to work for the government for one year.

But being a white-hat doesn’t always mean you work for the good guys. The would-be cyberspies discover that behind the scenes lurks a sinister NSA program, an artificial intelligence code-named Typhon, that has origins and an evolution both dangerous and disturbing. And if it’s not brought down, will soon be uncontrollable.

Doylestown Bookshop| WORD| Joseph-Beth Booksellers| Murder by the Book

Powells | Indiebound | Amazon| B&N| iBooks| Google Play| Books-a-Million

We’ve done this one before, and it’s always a blast — roll a d20 or use a random number generator, once for each of the two tables below. Then, take each of the results and mash them together in a flash fiction story.

Note: the goal is not to tell a literal fan-fic story set in those pop culture storyworlds — though, I guess if you wanna do that, hey, YOU DO YOU. The goal is to take the spirit of those two properties and find a story that embodies the weird mashup. (The origins of this particular challenge come from that old Hollywood conceit of pitching your original story to executives as X meets Y — “It’s Dennis the Menace meets Game of Thrones ha ha ha right? Hand me money.”)

You have, mmm, let’s say 2000 words for this one.

Due back by next Friday, 8/14, noon EST.

Post the story at your online space.

Give us a linky-poo so we can follow it back.

Now, the two tables —

Table X

1. Scooby Doo
2. How I Met Your Mother
3. Nightmare on Elm Street
4. Terminator
5. Star Wars
6. Chronicles of Narnia
7. The Mothman Prophecies
8. Snow Crash
9. D&D
10. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
11. My Little Pony
12. The Stand
13. Captain America
14. Inception
15. Babylon 5
16. District 9
17. Princess Mononoke
18. Avatar: The Last Airbender / Korra
19. Twin Peaks
20. Mad Max

Table Y

1. Dune
2. How To Train Your Dragon
3. Nightmare Before Christmas
4. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
5. Gremlins
6. Hellraiser
7. Indiana Jones
8. Toy Story
9. Ready Player One
10. Discworld
11. American Gods
12. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
13. Teen Wolf
14. Saving Private Ryan
15. Donnie Darko
16. The Walking Dead
17. Princess Bride
18. Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
19. Snow White
20. L.A. Confidential

Jim Hines is a dude who knows his way around funny, awesome fantasy — and now he brings his talent to the Fable franchise. Jim wanted to write a post about writing tie-in fiction, how could I say no? Frankly, Jim could say he wants to write about plaid sweaters, vintage recliners, or even chickens, and I’d let him. … wait, did I say chickens? Motherclucker.

* * *

A year or two back, my agent emailed to ask if I’d be interested in writing the official companion novel for the Fable Legends video game. The Fable franchise is fantasy with a good dose of quirky humor. Or “humour,” since the company (Lionhead) is based in the U.K. I said yes, and thus began what would come to be known as Fable: Blood of Heroes. And you know what?

It’s clucking poetry, man!

(Side note: Since both the Fable Legends video game and my tie-in are YA friendly, any profanity in this blog post has been automatically replaced by chicken-related terms.)

“Poetic” isn’t a word oft applied to tie-in works, but I think it applies. Bear with me here. Almost half a lifetime ago, I took a poetry course in graduate school. I learned several things that semester, one of which was that I’m pretty flocking bad at writing poetry. But it forced me to write in a different format with different constraints. I learning to tighten my writing, to cut away every extraneous word, and to use language in different ways. (That forced economy of language also gave me the foundation for some mad Twitter skills.)

That class made me think within a differently shaped box. Everyone talks about thinking outside the box. Outside of the box, you’ve got infinite space. You can write anything. You have total freedom, complete with Braveheart-style face paint and authorial battle cry! Sometimes that freedom is overwhelming. Sometimes you find yourself forging new paths. Sometimes you start to realize you’re trodding some of the same paths over and over again in your work.

Along comes a specific poetic structure or format. Suddenly, you’re forced to work within new constraints. To find new ways of fitting words together to evoke emotions and create images and tell stories.

Writing a companion novel pushed me in the same ways, with the added bonus of not having to listen to my professor tell stories about smoking pot with other poets.

With Blood of Heroes, I had the freedom to create my own story, but I needed to include eight predefined Heroes from the game. I had to write a book that would be accessible to new readers and at the same time familiar to those who’d played Fable before and were playing Fable Legends. I was writing in the world of Albion, a world other people had already mapped out and created and explored.

You might think having someone else do all that worldbuilding makes the book easier to write, and in some ways, that’s true. Lionhead’s maps are certainly prettier than anything I ever scrawled out for my own books. But it was also limiting.

You’re sitting there, plotting out your story, and your characters have to get from point A to point B. If you’re inventing your own world, you can mess with the map however you need to make that work. In my case, I discovered that given the problems I’d already dumped on the characters, you couldn’t get there from here. I sat back, glared at the map, and said something along the lines of, “Molting feathers!”

As annoying as that was, it forced me to be more creative, and to find a solution I might not have come up with in my own “original” work. The same thing happened with the characters. The work Lionhead had done developing the game pushed me to write about different kinds of characters, people (and non-people) I wouldn’t have come up with on my own.

I understand Mister Wendig has also done a minor tie-in project of his own recently, so I’m sure he’ll agree with me about everything I’ve said here. Tie-in work doesn’t always get a lot of respect, but in this case, I found it to be not only fun to write, but also a way of pushing my own abilities and growing as a writer.

If I’ve done my job right, the end result should be a lot of fun for everyone. Fable fans will learn more about Albion and (hopefully) appreciate some insight into the new game. Readers who’ve never played a game in their life should enjoy a rather madcap adventure about larger-than-life Heroes fighting a unique team of villains. There’s action and comedy and flirting and fighting and a dead king who still won’t shut up, and much more.

I hope you’ll check it out. And to my fellow writers, if you get the chance to work with a good company and publisher on a tie-in project, I highly recommend it.

* * *

Jim C. Hines made his professional debut in 1998 with “Blade of the Bunny,” an award-winning story that appeared in Writers of the Future XV. Since then, his short fiction has been featured in more than fifty magazines and anthologies. He’s written ten books, including Libriomancer, The Stepsister Scheme, and the humorous Goblin Quest series. He promises that no chickens were harmed in the making of this book.

Fable: Blood of Heroes comes out on August 4. You can read the first few chapters on the publisher’s website.

Jim C. Hines: Website | Twitter

Fable: Blood of Heroes: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

And now, a guest post by a fella named S.A. Hunt, who is a cracking author you probably aren’t reading. His newest is Malus Domestica — I just opened this book up the other day thinking I’d just take a peek, and next thing I knew, I was like, 30 pages in. Amazing prose. Reminds me of some of the most classic horror writers. Hunt has a storyteller’s ear, as you’ll see below.

* * *

Some people collect action figures.

I collect people.

I don’t know how you feel about that first point. Action figures. Some of you will probably think it’s childish, or a waste of money, or both of those.

Some of you might throw down a dollar for that janky old Optimus Prime or loose-hipped Skeletor that you used to have twenty-five years ago, lurking in a thrift shop’s toy aisle. Some of you will drop a paycheck on a superdeluxe polyresin Batman from Korea with a cloth cape and thirty-six articulation points and four interchangeable faces so realistic you’d swear the figure contained an actual miniaturized human soul.

I still live where I grew up, a stone’s throw from the real river featured in Deliverance, but I wasn’t that quintessential uphill-both-ways kid that had to play with sticks and bugs, although I did own an impressive armory of gnarled branches. One of them was a three-foot stick as straight as a pool cue with a top end that hooked like a dragon’s talon. I hung a soapstone pendant inside the crescent, burned sigils into the shaft with a magnifying glass, and called it my wizard staff.

No, I had a whole entourage of action figures. He-Man and M.A.S.K. and Dino-Riders; Thundercats, Silverhawks, Ghostbusters, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; X-Men, Ronin Warriors, and Batman, and finally, the ultimate bauble, LEGO. I loved them all, usually to the exclusion of the world around me. Whenever I had a tiny plastic Leonardo (the original Playmates line, of course, bow-legged and wielding brown swords) or Wolverine (yellow and blue spandex, with retractable claws) in my hands, that was the only thing that existed for me.

(Speaking of Leonardo’s swords, in middle school my Harley-riding father, who could pass for a Sons of Anarchy extra and whose only hobbies were turning rattlesnakes into belts and keeping Anheuser-Busch in business, would buy me an honest-to-God samurai sword at a swap meet. As schoolboys are wont to do, I accidentally stuck it in my thigh in eighth grade—the first of many self-inflicted war wounds—and ruined a pair of pants. But that’s another story for another day.)

Some of the best parts of getting a new action figure was reading the story on the back. You might say it was their BACKSTORY, hahaaaaa.

• This blue guy is the team’s mechanic, trained in the art of Ninjitsu from the age of four
• This girl was raised by howler monkeys and was taught how to melt steel with nothing but her voice
• This one can fly and talk to birds because he is the son of the bird god
• This dude with permanent goggles rides Tyrannosaurs in his spare time and his favorite food is eggplant casserole
• This man is made of snakes because fuck you

And then I’d ogle the pictures of the other toys in that crowd of heroes and villains and wonder what their backstories were. Sometimes I would make them up. Moss Man spent too much time swimming in the moat and now he’s covered in moss. Slithe is six years divorced. The only thing that can beat this giant glow-eyed skeleton demon full of naked viscera is a quick wit. Lion-O prefers to bathe himself.

You’re probably wondering, “Who is this spoiled little bastard, over here drowning in toys like one of those Golden Ticket kids that got their sleeves caught in Willy Wonka’s death-candy clockwork and dragged screaming into diabetic sweatshop oblivion?”

Well, I don’t know if you could call it fortunate, but I guess I lucked out when it came to being a little boy, at least from a little boy’s perspective. My parents split when I was barely out of diapers, which left me with a mother that worked constantly (and still does), an alcoholic father that had to be cajoled every Friday into weekend custody, and grandparents who lived in Alaska, which might as well have been the other side of the world.

(“You didn’t have to get me this,” I would murmur, head bent, quietly building a sleek spaceship under the patient guidance of its manual. This became a common refrain when talking to my father’s mother Edith.

“I know; I do it because I love you,” was always Grandma’s answer, and then she would pack up and fly back to Anchorage for another couple of years.)

So I was surrounded by shadows that demonstrated their love in absent material ways, and I sat in my room alone and acquainted myself with fictional people. I lived in a trailer and wore hand-me-down clothes, but I never lacked for imaginary friends that rode cyborg alligators and carried their battleaxes to Shoney’s.

To this day, the people in my mind have seemed more real to me than most of the people around me. The fortresses where they lived were infinitely more vibrant than this remote meth-infested banjo jungle people call “Georgia,” that’s for sure.

If you know me, you probably think this all explains a lot. But there’s also the fact that until my mother remarried and I discovered dog-eared copies of The Jungle Book, The Wizard of Oz, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, and Alice in Wonderland in the basement of my new stepfather’s house, the only book I had access to at home was a medical encyclopedia and back issues of Country magazine. I know where all your vital organs and arteries can be found, and I know all about your motherfucking gazebos.

***

When I was that little boy sitting in the kitchen with a box of plastic bricks, Earth ceased to exist.

Suddenly the kitchen table was a spaceport, and this little guy with his yellow jughead and cocked eyebrow was Rocko Starcrasher, ace pilot and genius ship builder. Or it was a lonely English moor, prime real estate for the skull-headed Dark Lord Necromungus to build a towering castle festooned with stiff plastic ivy.

Some of the reviews on my books claim that I’m a “mashup artist”, that I can bang together genres and make them play together seamlessly and effortlessly. The Outlaw King is a science fiction epic, wrapped up in a wilderness survival tale, buckled up in medieval trappings, disguised as a gunslinger western, posing as a cheesy 80s-style portal fantasy. Malus Domestica is a superheroine’s origin hiding in a magical-realism story masquerading as King-style horror.

Using one sole genre to tell a story feels confined to me… like driving a car in first gear or wearing nothing but shades of green. Incorporating a dozen disparate flavors in a suicide-soda of words comes naturally to me.

That probably comes from the action figure thing—at any given time I probably had one figure from a half-dozen intellectual properties. He-Man fought Panthro fought Egon Spengler fought Anubis. And then, of course, there was Lego, where you were as apt to find a raygun as a pirate cutlass, and just devise your own spacefaring robot skeleton knights, like you do.

***

Then there was the Video Game Renaissance, when my newly remarried mother could suddenly afford an NES.

Video games are also an integral part of my storytelling DNA. Zoot suit cats with grappling hooks. Flying skulls and walking mushrooms. Barbarians trudging through the magma vents of a volcano in specialized iron suits. Long afternoons in the back of the family car guiding Link through the bowels of Koholint Island.

When I finished a video game, I often restarted it and put the characters through my own stories, or obstacles of my own design. This was never more true than when I discovered debug modes and the Game Genie.

After I beat Sonic the Hedgehog 2, I would use the debug mode to put down new traps or structures, or even craft furniture out of props. I would type nonsense sequences into the Game Genie to delve into hidden back alleys of garbled code in Super Mario Bros 2 or Super Mario World that nobody was ever meant to see. Scrambled, glitched-out panoramas of ripped faces and broken ghosts, impossible structures cobbled together out of the familiar. A tower made of crypto-garbage hiding the secrets of a secret universe, turtles all the way up to where the sky ends in a jagged stratosphere made of fourteens and flowers.

Parting binary curtains and journeying into the beating heart of a video game is probably how the characters in my novels end up looking into the abyss for the unknowable. Everything I write seems to veer through time and tide, ultimately, toward unearthing some Grand Cosmic Truth.

(And speaking of video games, like, ohmygah, Chrono Trigger? That was a huge influence on my storytelling. Y’all know what I’m talking about. Medieval fantasy, post-apocalyptic wandering, prehistoric romps, handsome hard-hearted magicians, Lovecraftian star-beasts? It’s left fingerprints all over me.)

These days I can build worlds on a grand scale in Minecraft—and I have constructed marvelous and complicated things, for me at least: sprawling Viking towns, hovering airships, glass-domed underwater villages, monolithic castles, mechanical gates that shutter open and closed like the eye of a camera.

But it’s not the same. The kitchen table is there and on it is the box of bricks, but Rocko and the Dark Lord aren’t there to sit in their cockpits and thrones. It’s a lonely Eden.

That’s the missing element: the characters. The figures.

This is the root of my creative vibe and process, I believe. I never stopped playing with action figures and building my spires, and imagining how they would overcome hardships and navigate treacherous terrain. The characters in my novels all have metaphorical kung-fu grips, holographic decals, glow-in-the-dark splatters of barium paint, interchangeable faces.

And they do come straight from the factory pre-packaged with a human soul—mine.

***

I think this is how I’m able to craft such livable, authentic characters, and why they’re always searching for cosmic secrets. These people are real to me. They are me. They are all fragments of my soul, and I’m constantly searching under the carpets and behind the baseboards of life, hoping to find what makes reality tick.

When I’m not writing, I’m building these action figures in my head, exploring their springloaded tricks and gimmicks, filling out the backs of their boxes. And when I sit down to write, I’m shutting myself up in a room with these people in my headspace, and playing with these mental action figures, playing with them for myself, for my own enjoyment.

And to me, that’s part of succeeding at creating enjoyable characters, really—you have to enjoy them yourself if you want your reader to enjoy them. You can explore emotional themes through them, but a character that’s all angst and inner turmoil can grate on your reader’s nerves. As an indie, I’ve gotten myself roped into reading many stories with sour, depressing characters in drab, depressing plots, and I can’t help but wonderwhy? Why do this to yourself? Okay, many people go for lit-fic to get that, but in genre fiction? You’re just shooting yourself in the foot. I think genre readers appreciate those action-figure characters: expressive personality, capable, dynamic, easy to empathize with, easy to identify with.

The best of these initially simple characters are deep and dark once you scratch through the surface, but nobody wants a mopey, defeatist, nobody-understands-me emo protagonist starring in their own My Chemical Romance version of A Christmas Carol. Now, I’m not talking about “grimdark” – a lot of that is ultimately, when you get down to it, either the power of the human spirit to prevail even in the face of despair, or it’s just the author burning ants with a magnifying glass. What I’m talking about are weepy, self-pitying emo-teenager protagonists starting at the bottom and just going lower, forced to wallow in every miserable tragedy of their short lives in inner-monologue vignettes. The characters never grow, the narrative never evolves, the situations never improve. Harry Potter lives under the stairs for the rest of his life and never gets to go to Hogwarts. There are a lot of indies that do this, and it’s all cookie and no chip.

Why? Why would readers want to subject themselves to that?

Okay, that might have been a bit of a rant. And a tangent.

The point is, to me, a compelling genre character is one that makes you want to read the back of the figure’s box. If you were sharing toys with another kid, this character is the one you’d slip off to the side and keep for yourself. Its plastic leer gleams from the shelves of the toy aisle, with a half-dozen strange accessories and a colorful backboard. You can’t wait to get home with it and get this tiny plastic hero into—and back out of—trouble. You see something in this character that you identify with.

I always identified with the offbeat supporting character, myself. The Panthro. The Knuckles. The Bluegrass. The Man-at-Arms. The Rocket Raccoon. The Catwoman. That bunch is who I saved for myself.

I like to be the Geppetto that giggles deviously as he’s carving that little wooden knight, knowing that this captivating character is soon going to be fighting wolves and leaping ravines in a reader’s hands. Be the toymaker, that’s what I do when I write. And I try to make all of my toys the ones you hide under your pillow when your cousin comes to visit.

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S. A. Hunt is a U.S. veteran and the author of the award-winning Outlaw King fantasy-gunslinger series and dark-fantasy Malus Domestica. He lives in Lyerly, GA where he tempts fate by kayaking on the river from Deliverance with his friends.