*slowly lowers you into the NEWS HIVE*

*where dancing, stinging NEWS BEES consumes your flesh and leaves you as bones*

Ahem.

I am back from the stinking heat pocket known as Indianapolis, fresh out of the whirlwind of games and writery stuff called the GenCon Writer’s Symposium. It was a wonderful time had by all (or at least me, for all I know the rest of them were miserable), whereupon I got to hang out on panels and bullshit about writing with other awesome writers. Many of whom are friends, too, and it’s great time and again to reconnect with other AUTHORIAL HUMANS to sort of share in troubles and triumphs and get your creative batteries recharged. These are Necessary Things.

Things I done did whilst there:

• Talked to writers of every level.

• Hung with writers I consider genuine pals — folks like Stephen Blackmoore, Delilah Dawson, Sam Sykes, Brian McClellan, Gwenda Bond, Kameron Hurley, JC Hutchins, Max Gladstone, Elizabeth Bear, and more — and got to meet writers I’d not yet met, too. Folks I admire, like Daryl Gregory. Or folks I’ve talked to for a long time but never actually encountered in the wild, like Elsa Henry. (And holy shit, Terry Brooks!) Or folks I just don’t see often enough like Scott Lynch, Jim Zub, John Hornor Jacobs, Maurice Broaddus. If talent were an obelisk, the size of said obelisk present at the Writer’s Symposium could’ve crushed a whole city had it toppled.

• Got to meet friends and fans I knew online but were not sure if they were just constructs of my imagination or not. Folks like Andrea Judy and Charlotte Moore!

• Three words: LIVE STORIUM GAME. Stephen Hood and Josh Whiting of Storium said to me, Dawson, Blackmoore, Sykes and McClellan, “Hey, you guys should play a live Storium game for the Worldbuilders Charity,” and we said, sure, sure, yeah, that totally won’t be a depraved drain-circle of sheer narrative perversity. We played a game that quickly descended into… something? Something that featured things like Assdazzler, Mooseknuckle, Brangelina, hammer dancing, Nickleback, ass bees, ecto-jizz, ecto-jazz, magical proctology, a vampire everybody ignored, Storg, Jamantha, Japertha, and so much more. We raised money. We ruined our careers. Glory be. Will that game ever be made public? Only the Storium gods truly know.

• Gwen Pearson of the Purdue Bug Barn said, “Hey, I’ll take anybody from GenCon who wants to go to hangout with me and a buncha bugs.” And so I said, “BUGGERY IT SHALL BE,” and then quickly revised that sentiment realizing what I’d just said. Me, Dawson, Blackmoore and Gladstone (the weirdest law firm ever) went and got a half-day lesson about ants, bees, beetles, spiders, caterpillars, millipedes, cloacal popping, phalloblasting, robots, dermestids, OBTs, ant-based thunderdomes, ants that smell like blue cheese, and more. I got to handle a tarantula named Rosie. It was actually awesome. She was gentle and slow and actually cute if you look at her up close. (Super derpy.) You may gaze upon my SPIDER DELIGHT here. Or you may take this present from Delilah, which is totally not a spider.

I probably did more shit, but there you go.

Thank you to Marc Tassin for putting it all together!

Zer0es Preorder Bonus

So, here’s a thing.

Let’s say you wanted to pre-order Zer0es, my “hackers go against a self-aware NSA surveillance program” novel which is hopefully a lot of scary, thrillery fun.

Let’s say you wanted to pre-order but then get SOMETHING EXTRA for your troubles.

Well, hey, here you go.

Pre-order either the hardcover or e-book edition from anywhere at all, and you can get the first two chapters of my next Harper sci-fi thriller, a novel I call Myrmidon, about an FBI futurist named Hannah Stander investigating a dead body in a cabin in upstate New York.

The link for the pre-order page (where you enter in your pre-order info!) is right here.

Pre-ordering is an awesome thing that tells booksellers how much to order and if the book has buzz. Plus, you buying a book like Zer0es lets me keep on writing other books and also running the blog. So if you’re one of those people who tells me you read this blog but have never read my books, now’s a good time to start, because hosting this sucker ain’t cheap. (/guiltprod)

You can preorder from:

Indie bookstores like:

Doylestown Bookshop, WORD, Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Murder by the Book.

(Or, of course, from Powells or a local bookseller found via Indiebound.)

Plus: Amazon, B&N, iBooks, Google Play, Books-a-Million.

Amazon listed the book as one of the best books of August!

Typhon emerges — uh, I mean, Zer0es releases — 8/18. For related events, see Appearances.

Zer0es: First Four Chapters!

Let’s also say you’re all like, “MAN, I really wish I had some of that book to read right now.”

That, too, shall be done.

In fact, you can read the first four chapters right now.

And, if enough folks click that link and spread it around, a fifth chapter will be revealed.

IT WILL BE UPLOADED STRAIGHT TO YOUR BRAIN VIA A LOUD, SHRILL MONOTONE —

Okay, actually, it might just be like, a PDF or something, I dunno.

Cornell Collective!

I was very fortunate to be invited onto Paul Cornell’s newest podcast endeavor, The Cornell Collective! A delightful time was had as I joined Leah Moore and Christel Dee. Go listen!

Mockingbird On Sale

The second Miriam Black book, Mockingbird, is now only $1.99 for the month of August.

So, you know what to do.

KILL IN MY NAME.

*checks notes*

Uhh. I mean, “Go buy the book?”

*sheepish grin*

Blog Snafu

Some folks correctly noticed that I wasn’t approving unmoderated comments at the blog over the weekend while I was at GenCon. I had minimal access to Internet and for some reason my phone doesn’t always like me to administrate big chunks of bloggage on the fly. The iPad is better but I couldn’t get it to any meaningful wi-fi for that purpose. Apologies!

Comments released from their cages, now.

Today, I am off to the GAME-SLICK WILDS of GENCON, where I will talk a lot about writing and hopefully maybe sneak in a game or two and also did I mention the bad-ass Storium charity game that you should totally go to BECAUSE CHARITY?

Anyway, so to go onto the game theme, I figured I’d pose a pair of questions:

a) Favorite tabletop non-RPG game?

b) Favorite tabletop pen-and-paper RPG game?

Use the comments.

Get to answering.

GO.

And if you’re gonna be at Gencon — swing by, say hi!

[disclaimer: I am not a MINDOLOGIST or a PSYCHOHOLIC or in any way an expert on subjects relating to emotion or the human brain, so take all this with a entire salt lick]

I just read an article that literally had the headline:

THIS EL NINO PHOTO SHOULD SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF THE WEST COAST.

(I’m not going to link to it, because fuck that article right in its bloviating trash-hole.)

El Nino is so bad, the article posits, that the entire populace of the West Coast of America should — right now — stand up and just defecate themselves while screaming in terror.

It’s the kind of article whose headline should be read by a wildly gesticulating Muppet whose felt is on fire. Whose plastic googly eyes are literally melting out of his hand-ensconced face.

And this isn’t new. This is pretty much every article on the Internet — everything is either OBLIVIOUS OPTIMISM or PANTS-SHITTING FEARGASM. Your hometown is going to be destroyed by an earthquake probably tomorrow maybe! Something-something super-volcano! Global warming is going to destroy New York City! Something-something crime! Something-something serial killers! Hackers just hacked your wife! Bats fucked pigs and mice in a batpigmice fuckorgy and now there’s a batpigmouse flu and it’s probably one day going to make you sneeze your brain out of your head! Be afraid! Be fucking scared! FIERY DOOM IS ABOUT TO RAIN DOWN UPON YOU WHY ARE YOU NOT PROPERLY WORSHIPFUL OF THE FEAR YOU MUST BE FEELING RIGHT NOW AT PRESENT IN YOUR HEART ALWAYS. Now look at these funny kittens with lightsabers.

I mean, holy shit, have you ever turned on the local news? The national news? It’s just a scare parade, man. Everything sucks. Your town is dangerous. The country is dangerous. Those people who aren’t you are dangerous. It’s like watching a horror movie for the jump scares except the jump scares are things that are actually happening right now apparently right outside your door.

It’s not that we don’t have problems. We do. And will. This is a planet of seven billion people. Shit is going to get fucky with seven billion people bumping into each other and into animals and glaciers and robots and whatever else we have wandering around out there. Global warming is probably the most serious challenge in my lifetime. Right now the abuse at the hands of government surveillance and police is unparalleled. Pretty much any hobo in clown makeup and Nazi regalia can go and buy an arsenal of guns from your local flea market.

This is a time of epic challenges. This is a time of necessary change and, perhaps, even upheaval.

So, being scared is understandable.

But we also have to understand that we’re being manipulated into fear. By the media. By the Internet. By our chosen social groups and echo chambers.

Listen, here’s the thing: fear is not that productive.

It’s productive in the short term, in fear-based situations.

Like, let’s say you’re at the park. And you’re walking along, humming a jaunty tune. Next thing you know: the bushes shake, and out comes a motherfucking tiger. Big. Rangy. Mangy. Starving. You’re it. You’re dinner. And the tiger is joined by a prehistoric claw-bear, and maybe they’re working in concert, or maybe they’re competing to see which one can eat your entire head first.

Fear at that moment is entirely perfect.

It is a necessary response.

Because fear engenders in us two potential responses: fight or flight. Punch or flee. Fuck or run.

You can either stand your ground and try to go toe-to-toe with the tiger-bear combo, or you can haul ass out of that park and never go there again because who the hell let tigers and bears into the park? I don’t want to put up a fence to stop immigrants, but tigers and bears, sure okay.

Fear as a momentary response has value.

Fear as a long-term emotional strategy destroys you.

You look at global warming, and it’s becoming clear that fear-based tactics only engender (according to this article) “denial, fatalism, and polarization.” You either get so anxious about it that you’re like, “Well, fuck it, we’re all going to boil so I might as well just set fire to this mountain of tires,” or you become so angrily optimistic that you grab for any lifeline you read about global warming being a sham or about some new mini-ice age we’re about to get (which is bullshit, by the way). Driving people to a fear-based life — especially when things seem relatively okay outside your window at any given moment — is a great way to inspire a symphony of anxiety inside your head. We’re urged to PANIC PANIC PANIC but the birds are chirping and the sun is up and suddenly we’re feeling OH GOD SWEET FUCKING HELLMONKEYS I HAVE TO FIGHT OR FLIGHT BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO FIGHT AND I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO FLEE and so you just stand there, paralyzed by uncertainty and fear. The fear stops being a momentary response and becomes a long-term strategy — and fear as a long-term strategy is not a healthy way to be.

I remember that one of the takeaways of Bowling for Columbine (regardless of what you feel about Michael Moore) wasn’t that guns are our problem, but fear was the real problem. Fear was the Emperor Palpatine manipulating us. (And others are in turn manipulating us through fear.) The events of 9/11 were a thing that inspired us to fear-based action — our leaders used that fear to manipulate us. One thing the Star Wars prequels actually got kinda right is how easy it is to puppet a frightening population. Guns are the tools of fear, too. You don’t build up an arsenal for the art of it. You build up the arsenal for the doomsday. For the time when the people who aren’t you come to hurt you, or take something from you, or [insert made-up thing]. You can sell a person a gun by reminding them of all the things they should fear out there in the world. And then you can sell someone else a gun because that person should be afraid of the last person to whom you sold guns. “That guy’s got guns,” you whisper. “And he looks pretty sketchy. Shouldn’t you have one, too? Jeez. What if he decides to shoot up a grocery store when you’re in it? That’d be a tragedy if you weren’t PREPARED. Am I right?”

Fear is like one of those zombie parasites that controls its host.

(Here we hear the echo of FDR: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” And then we hear the modern addenda: “And also killer bees and brain amoebas and global warming and killer cops and terrorists and hackers and too many guns or not enough guns and Other People and ebola and volcanoes and earthquakes and tsunamis and did I mention killer bees already okay you know what just be afraid of your entire present and future. So, be afraid of fear, but then also be afraid of all this other stuff. HAVE YOU SHAT THINESELF YET?” FDR asks you with bulging eyes and spit-froth lips. Then he goes back to watching the news, digesting all the horror punctuated by advertising designed to get him to buy things in his fear-blind panic state.)

And the fear doesn’t even have to be real. Fear of science seems to be at an all-time-high. Fear of GMOs and vaccinations. Fear of things we need to actually help us. Sometimes social media helps clear the fog — but it can just as easily spread lies and misinformation, quick as lightning.

It’s across the board, this fear.

Listen, I talk to a lot of newbie writers, and one of the things that always seem to hold them back is — you guessed it! Fear. They’re just nebulously afraid of… things. They’re afraid of agents and editors. They’re afraid of failure. They’re afraid of success. They’re afraid of the horror stories they’ve heard. They’re afraid of getting published but then not selling, or getting published and selling but then selling a second book and oh shit what if that one doesn’t do well and next thing you know, they’re hemorrhaging blood out of their various face-holes. It’s a random rag-tag assortment of fear. And again: it’s utterly paralyzing. Total creative vapor lock, man.

It isn’t healthy.

It damn sure isn’t productive.

I don’t have any answer to this, by the way. This rant is itself unproductive. I don’t know how we get out of the cycle of fear. And I don’t mean to diminish the very real challenges we face — but the challenges we face are presented so often with just klaxons of terror and anxiety instead of solution-based direction. (This is one of the reasons I do like Obama. He presents challenges in a calm, almost comforting way. He doesn’t kick over his podium and barf into his own hands, screaming about how we better do what he says or we’re all gonna die from super-volcanoes.) (Though now that I think about it, this might be how I attempt to get things done in the future: threatening people with super-volcanoes. I mean, no, I can’t make super-volcanoes, but who wants to take the chance? Maybe I secretly do. I mean, what if, right? Maybe you should just give me that hamburger for free because FEAR FEAR FEAR and also super-volcanoes.)

We have to give up the fear.

We’re addicted to it.

We click it. We watch it. We embrace it.

And then we sit, paralyzed. Or we deny.

The change that results from fear is rarely the right kind of change. We need some way forward that doesn’t constantly try to shock our systems with panic and doom. I don’t know what the way forward is, except that individually we have to try to be conscious of when we’re being manipulated into fear and then finding the way around it — like fear is just a traffic snarl on our emotional or intellectual highway, an obstacle to overcome rather than a tool to wield.

And that is its cover.

All hail the work of Adam Doyle!

In the book, Miriam heads cross-country to look for a psychic who can help her understand — and potentially be rid of — her gift of being able to see how people are going to die when she touches them. But her search is fraught with danger, and her path intersects with that of a dangerous cult of domestic terrorists who want to use Miriam to aid in their mad crusade.

You can pre-order the book now — it comes out April 5th, 2016. Hardcover!

The first book, Blackbirds, is presently $1.99 at Amazon until Friday. That’s e-book — the print edition will release in September, and I can say, it’s very, very pretty.

And you can also check out Mockingbird (Book 2) and The Cormorant (Book 3).

(Print to follow, too.)

Further, if you’re so inclined —

“Interlude: Swallow” is a bridging novelette that connects The Cormorant to Thunderbird. You can find it in the collection Three Slices, which also features an Iron Druid story by Kevin Hearne, and a Blud story by Delilah S. Dawson.

There’s this thing that happens sometimes where someone asks about book recommendations from an author and that author — probably a white guy, like me — rattles off some names of other authors who are also probably white guys like me. I don’t believe this to be an actively racist kind of thing, but more a product of an industry that doesn’t publish as many writers of color. And when they do publish them, they tend to remain marginalized because of various institutional reasons. Plus, then you get that excuse that’s meant to be a positive — “I don’t see color!” — which is a noble thought that ultimately fails, because while you mean I don’t give into preconceived divisions between race, what often results is, I don’t see color because mostly I see only white and if I don’t see color then I don’t have to acknowledge people of color.

I made an effort a couple years back to include a far deeper bullpen of women writers on my shelves, and I’d say at this point about half of my SFF reading is of women authors. This isn’t because of some kind of diversity bingo — I’m not reading books that are bad just to read them because they were written by a woman. I’m reading awesome books by awesome authors. The single result of expanding my reading has been that I am reading more amazing books.

I’ve been making the same effort to include more writers of color — and so it seems like this is a good time to open the comments up to recommendations of writers of color in the SFF space (or, more broadly, feel free to wander into horror and YA if you need to). I recognize there’s some danger in making this a Very Special Post like it’s an Afterschool Special or That One Panel At A Con About Women Authors Where All The Other Panels Are Assumed Then To Be About Men By Default. The ideal goal is, when we recommend books, to have a more diverse slate of books to recommend and not sequester them in their very own marginal post — at the same time, my hope is this post serves as a seeding ground for myself and for others where we learn about awesome books we’re not yet reading. And then we read them and we include them going forward in the books about which we proselytize.

HEY LOOK, MORE AWESOME BOOKS FUCKING YAY.

Right? Right.

Here’s a dollop of reading suggestions on my part, but for your part — get into the comments, recommend some writers of color and what they’ve written. Short stories and novellas are totally on the table, though I’ll recommend only novels right now as my reading of short fiction lately has been woefully shallow. If any work is free to read on the web, feel free to drop links.

(I do recognize that not all writers of color are self-identified, and the same goes for some women and QUILTBAG authors — but, many are, so the effort must be made.)

(Also, this really isn’t meant to be a proving ground for arguments about whether or not we should read more diversely or whatever your stance happens to be — please use the comments as a recommendation engine only. In this instance, be a fountain, not a drain. Thanks.)

The Recs

Nnedi Okorafor: Lagoon. I just started reading this a few days ago and my mouth cannot make the proper pleasing sounds. This woman’s prose is fucking astounding. Cinematic, yet also occasionally dreamlike — science-fiction, but also occasional fantastical? It’s a weird, wonderful book so far. The plot is fine and all, but her prose is a place I wanna live.

Daniel Jose Older: Half-Resurrection Blues. This is how I like my urban fantasy. Real, monstrous, street-level stuff. (I have an unattainable dream of mashing up this series with my own The Blue Blazes given how both are set in and around Brooklyn and Manhattan.) It’s funny, too, and grim, and all the things I want. I have Shadowshaper, his newest YA, but haven’t cracked the cover yet as my tbr pile threatens to crush me beneath its weight.

Maurice Broaddus: King Maker. The Arthurian myth recast in modern-day inner-city Indianapolis. Good stuff — neat analogs to the mythology here (Excalibur becomes a gun, the Caliburn, f’rex). It’s a fantasy novel but occasionally pretty brutal about the lives of these characters. It’s harder stuff than you realize — not fluffy fantasy.

Aliette de Bodard: Obsidian & Blood. This is three books in one, and it was a jaw-dropper for me in what it does with your expectations of genre — what I mean is, this is essentially a detective novel set in the Aztec Empire, and is chockablock with blood magic and necromancy and the drama of the gods and goddesses. An ARC of her newest, House of Shattered Wings, just landed across my doorstep, and I’m excited to read it.

Greg Van Eekhout: California Bones. I dunno why this book is $2.99 right now, but do yourself a favor and fling yourself upon it. It’s this cool LA urban fantasy about unearthing ancient things — but just as it’s sometimes about digging up real bones of old creatures, it’s also about digging up the bones of the past.

SL Huang: Zero Sum Game. Listen, I don’t like math, so when you tell me this is a book about a person whose superpower is math, I’m not interested. More the stupid on my part, because this first book is a blast from start to finish. Huang writes with hella energy — whatever mad calculus she’s doing, she’s doing it right. Curse her for making me care about math.

Now?

Your turn.

You read that right.

Today, I’m not asking for 1000 words of fiction.

I’m asking for a 1000 word essay (meaning, blog post).

And I want it on this subject:

WHY I WRITE.

That’s it. I wanna know why you write. What it is that makes you want to tell stories and write them down. What drives you? Something biographical? Something internal? Dig deep. Be thoughtful. Write it out like the bad-ass that you know you are.

The standard rules apply, otherwise:

Write it at your online space. Drop a link to it here in the comments.

Due in one week: 7/31.

Your time is now: tell us why you write.