Here’s how the Internet kinda works.

I have something that I think is cool or interesting or that I desperately wish people would recognize. I have this thing — think of it as a beach ball or some kind of many-pronged sex gizmo or perhaps the glowing briefcase from Pulp Fiction — and I’m trying to get other people to take it. I want them to grab it and then pass it along. It’s like a funky little game of Whisper Down The Lane except for the most part, the information remains intact. It is, in its way, a viral transmission: a bacterial replication of information. A graphic I think is funny. A blog post I wrote. A ghost story about cats. An article espousing the propaganda I believe about vaccinated GMO grandmother hipsters. A campaign to raise money for toilet dogs — meaning, dogs found in toilets who now must be rehabilitated to live once more among people and other dogs, acclimated anew to Life Outside Big Porcelain. This is memetic transference: the epidemic of ideas.

We are all nodes on this network of sharing.

Some of us are doorways — open for the transmission of pretty much whatever. Our door is mostly open and we pretty much hand shit through that open space day and night.

Some of us are walls with tiny windows or little boltholes in our brick. We block most everything except a tiny extruded Play-Doh tube of meager information that we find somehow vital.

Some of us are kept gates: portcullises monitored to make sure whoever comes into our castle isn’t covered in plague buboes or won’t try to sell us on cults or Tupperware or meat sold out of a van.

I received an email the other day about some… writing thing. A website with a free something and a contest for something and something-something I don’t fucking know. But one sentence in that email struck me: “I’m contacting you because you represent the doorway to a larger audience.” (The email also used words like “micropublicity” and “a bonafide movement” and then also said he’d shout-out my blog and also hey he wrote a novel too well what a shocker! Ahem.)

Here’s the thing:

I do not represent the doorway to a larger audience.

You people reading this are my audience.

And I am not the way to get to you.

What I mean is this — I am not going to take any old thing handed to me and just jam it into your hands. “Here, someone gave me this because I am a doorway to you,” I mumble as I hand you a jizz-hardened mitten filled with old potato salad. “Someone said I should share this so I am sharing it.” And then I use your hands to give the mitten a good squish.

I despise the word “tastemaker” with the heat of a thousand fire ants nibbling my perineum, because I have little interest in somehow making tastes or setting trends. But what I am interested in is being a trusted source for… well, whatever. Good books or smart ideas or tasty coffee or the finest animated GIFs the world has ever seen. I curate what I pass along.

My social media footprint these days is bigger than I had anticipated. This is inadvertent bragging time, but I now have over 40k Twitter followers and almost 8k subscribers to this blog and 10k of additional visitors to this space daily. Which means over 3 million visits annually. I think I’m operating at 0.3 Scalzis? Something like that. Point is, for whatever reason, you poor misguided mooncalves keep on coming back here and hearing whatever inane shit I have to say and share with some regularity.

I thank you for that.

And one of the ways I thank you — or try to, anyway — is by not sharing total garbage. Or even passing along anything that has the potential to be secret garbage — like, “Oh, look, a pretty vase, OH GOD WHY DIDN’T ANYBODY LOOK INSIDE IT’S A SCORPION ORGY THEIR LITTLE LEGS AND BITS SCRAPING AND TINKING AGAINST THE CERAMIC NOOOOO WHY CHUCK WHYYYYYY.” I don’t have the time to curate everything you want me to to share. And I get a lot of requests to share things — writing contests, events, charities, pleas for financial aid, self-published books, and on and on. Sometimes people are trying to engage me by talking to me directly, and sometimes it’s folks just throwing spaghetti at the wall that is Wendig and seeing if anything sticks. They don’t even bother engaging. They’re just trying to hand off their Internet Thing in a dark room and hoping somebody like me will be dumb enough to grab it and sleepily pass it along.

So, this is why I won’t share the thing you want me to share.

I don’t know it and I don’t trust it.

I won’t share your writing contest. Or your publishing opportunity.

I won’t share your book no matter how you published it.

I won’t share your GoFundMe campaign to rehabilitate Toilet Dogs.

I won’t share your IndieGogo campaign to fund a smartwatch that also contains Nano-Bees to attack your enemies okay wait I might actually fund that one so bounce me an email, okay?

I won’t share most of the things you’re going to ask me to share.

Because I don’t know you and I don’t have the time to curate. That curation would become literally a full-time job. I have a hard enough time answering my actually important emails — how am I supposed to vet your plea for charity? I won’t even donate to or recommend an actual charity without first running it through CharityNavigator. How am I supposed to know that you’re not going to take the money you raise and fuck off to Fiji for 10 days? No, no, I’m sure you’re not a scammer — but everyone else is, so how am I supposed to know?

In this game of viral memetic transmission, I like to cover my mouth when I’m talking with you. Meaning, I won’t just cough on you and pass along any old cold. You won’t just get boring old warts from me, my friends. If I share any of my diseases, it will be the good stuff. The primo vintage gonorrhea. The rare flu that killed all those bats that one time. A very special Norovirus from a cruise ship featuring that celebrity you love so you can have the same diarrhea as Donnie Wahlberg or I dunno, whoever. Only the best for you, my darlings. Only the best.

Note: all this changes if we actually know each other. I’ll endeavor to take that time if we’re friends or, at the very least, friendly online (though no promises, of course). But otherwise? Your pleas to share things will thud against me like a shoe thrown at a bear’s head. It will drop into the mud, unregarded and ignored. And then I will eat you because I am an actual bear.

I am not, however, your doorway.

DISCLAIMER: THE FOLLOWING BLOG POST REPRESENTS THE OPINIONS OF AUTHOR CHUCK WENDIG AND NOT HIS PUBLISHER, HIS AGENT, HIS EDITORS, HIS PUBLICISTS, HIS READERS, HIS BLOG SUBSCRIBERS, HIS WIFE, HIS CHILD, HIS DOG, THE PERSON HE KEEPS LOCKED IN HIS ATTIC, HIS TWITTER FOLLOWERS, THOSE HE FOLLOWS ON TWITTER, AMERICA, ALL EARTHLINGS, ALL MARTIANS, POLTERGEISTS, GOBLINS AND OTHER FAE CREATURES, THE BDSM “PONYBOY” COMMUNITY, BEARDOS, WEIRDOS, FRIENDOS, CHUDS, CHORFS, SJWS, ASSHOLES, NON-ASSHOLES, OTHER AUTHORS, OTHER NON-AUTHORS, AND FACEBEES. ACTUALLY, HIS WORDS DO REPRESENT FACEBEES. BECAUSE HE IS THE EMPEROR OF FACEBEES.

Here are the deets as I see ’em —

Irene Gallo is the creative director of Tor Books, and associate publisher of Tor.com. She has been a boon to authors and to that publisher. And Tor.com is amazing and lauded for its quality and its bravery of material exactly because she is the type of person who helped foster that environment.

The Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies were the slate-making Hugo-hammer that fell hard like a meteor against this year’s award season. To mix my metaphors, they stormed the beach of the awards they imagined they were being kept from (despite having had nominations in the past), and took a bunch of noisy defecations in the sand in front of people. And, when called upon it — “Hey, you’re shitting up the place,” they only doubled down, as folks of that ilk tend to do.

Irene Gallo made a statement on her personal Facebook page (note those words: “personal Facebook page”) that said the following when asked to explain the Sad/Rabid Puppies phenomenon:

“There are two extreme right-wing to neo-nazi groups, called the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies respectively, that are calling for the end of social justice in science fiction and fantasy. They are unrepentantly racist, sexist and homophobic. A noisy few but they’ve been able to gather some Gamergate folks around them and elect a slate of bad-to-reprehensible works on this year’s Hugo ballot.”

This, of course, made the assholes angry. Because when you call assholes assholes, they tend to flail around and make louder asshole noises — it is the asshole’s natural defense mechanism.

The result was that the publisher of Tor, Tom Doherty, felt the need to pen a public letter of apology to the other spurned authors and readers (translation: the Sad and Rabid Puppies) assuring them that this has been dealt with because Irene Gallo is a naughty, naughty editor (/clucktongue). You can read that message here: “A Message from Tom Doherty.” You should note that someone thought it was a very good idea to leave the comments open (!) and there are now 100+ comments gurgling in that septic system. You can read them if you care to remind yourself what sometimes gets clogged in the pipes below this here Internet.

That letter ends with the following two paragraphs:

“In short, we seek out and publish a diverse and wide ranging group of books. We are in the business of finding great stories and promoting literature and are not about promoting a political agenda [sic]

Tor employees, including Ms. Gallo, have been reminded that they are required to clarify when they are speaking for Tor and when they are speaking for themselves. We apologize for any confusion Ms. Gallo’s comments may have caused. Let me reiterate: the views expressed by Ms. Gallo are not those of Tor as an organization and are not my own views. Rest assured, Tor remains committed to bringing readers the finest in science fiction – on a broad range of topics, from a broad range of authors.”

Which, to me, reads like:

a) the publisher wants to publicly shame a woman editor for saying things that other editors have said in the past, and in publishing that apology out on the big wide Internet, they then:

b) want to reassure the horrible people that hey, horrible people, you’re welcome under the tent, too, and we’re sorry for pointing out that you’ve been defecating on our beach for a while, no, no, it’s fine, keep defecating on our beach, we are inclusive to all beach-goers and that includes you feisty beach-shitters too here we’ll even put up a sign BEACH-SHITTERS WELCOME TOO!

This is the publisher that housed a known harasser of women (and said nothing), by the way.

So, we’re talking double — nngh, maybe triple? — standards going on here.

I won’t get into the validity of her words — that is a slippery and easy trip down a particularly cankerous meat tunnel, and I’ll let you take that grotesque journey all by your lonesome, but I will right quick call out two comments by authors associated with Sad and Rabid Puppies.

The first, from Theo Beale:

“White American men simply don’t rape these days. At this point, unless a womann [sic] claims it was committed by a black or Hispanic man she didn’t previously know, all claims of rape, especially by a college woman, have to be considered intrinsically suspect.”

Then: Tor author John C. Wright (of the Sad/Rabid slate, which earned him a historic number of nominations) took great offense at the same-sex pairing that occurred as part of The Legend of Korra cartoon — but hey, why not let him talk about it in his own words?

“I am not unrepentantly homophobic. I am nothing of the kind. It is a lie.

I follow the Catholic teaching on same sex attraction and how one deals with it. In public, I have heaped scorn on those who use a children’s cartoon, one I loved, to insinuate their pro-perversion propaganda in a cowardly and craven way.

I have no hate, no fear, nothing but respect for homosexuals.

You and people like you who use the false cloak of compassion for homosexual [sic] to lure them into ruining their lives, you are the ones for whom I have no respect. You are the ones who hate them; you are the one who urge them down ever darker paths.”

That, by the way, is from a comment he left on the Tom Doherty letter.

Not a year ago. Last night. In response to this very situation.

(Apparently the best way to deny homophobia is to double down on it? I dunno.)

I’ll let you just chaw on that one for a while.

I find it no small irony that both the Sad and Rabid Puppies — who so strongly espouse freedom of speech, would then endeavor to rob that from Irene Gallo unless, gasp, we’re talking about another double-standard in play? It’s almost like women get treated differently in the world and held to different standards… hmm. *strokes beard thoughtfully*

Regardless of whether or not you agree with what she said, the fact remains: her publisher publicly rubbed her nose in the mess, then threw her under a bus, then threw her body to a pack of wolves. Again: publicly. Not privately. Perhaps this was all part of some legal stratagem or even a legal necessity — but what it feels like is an entreaty by the publisher to appease folks who believe and opine about really horrible things. And any time you want to make sure that your “inclusiveness” includes the most awful amongst us, please understand you’re not creating a safe space for anybody but the abusers. It’s like putting up a sign in your flowerbed: POISON IVY WELCOME.

I stand by Irene Gallo because she is a person who has the right to air her personal sentiments, regardless of whether or not we find them disagreeable. She has that right without being smacked across the nose by her employer in a sanctioned public shaming. I do not agree with Tor’s posturing on this point because it represents a double-standard of sexism and favoritism. I do not agree with Tor because they are opening the tent flap to the worst among us. The publisher is cultivating an invasive species with a letter like that. They are lending them space on the debate floor, turning this whole affair into a clownish, brutal, and bullying mosh pit.

P.S. Comments are off because at least someone is smart enough not to open the sewer grate.

Some more quickie bits and bytes about my upcoming thriller, ZER∅ES:

• Hey, Kirkus reviewed it! You can read the whole review here (features a lot of plot and character details), or just behold the majesty of this quote:

“This is an ambitious, bleeding-edge piece of speculative fiction that combines hacker lore, wet-wired horror, and contemporary paranoia in a propulsive adventure that’s bound to keep readers on their toes. An action-packed yet cerebral thriller that lives in that murky nexus between today and the future.”

Woo! I’m going to sit around and bask in that one for a while, thanks.

• One of my online heroes, author and futurist bad-ass Ramez Naam, has blurbed the book thusly:

“A sci-fi surveillance thriller with a twisted heart of creepy horror. It grabs you by the throat on page one, and never lets go.”

Mez is brilliant at bringing the truth hammer down online when it comes to bad science and cuckoo ideas. I’ve seen him speak, and he’s really got a keen eye cast forward toward what the future might hold. And no better example exists than his own high-tech near-future trilogy, starting with Nexus. Also: follow him @ramez. Or I’ll punch you.

• A reminder that I’ll be pre-launching ZEROES at my hometown bookstore, Doylestown Bookshop, on 8/17 at 6:30PM. Details here at the bookstore’s website.

• And the launch itself will happen on 8/18 at Joseph Beth Bookstore in Lexington, KY…

• With a followup to one of my favorites, WORD in Brooklyn where you also get Daniel Jose Older…

• And an eventual stop at Murder by the Book in Houston!

• More to come (and stops at Gen-Con, SDCC, Dragon-Con, and Decatur Book-Fest).

• Okay, so unrelated to the book but hey don’t forget — you’ve got just over a week to get in on the REVENGE OF THE AWKWARD AUTHOR PHOTO contest.

Anyway!

You can preorder ZEROES now from one of the bookstores noted above —

Doylestown Bookshop | Murder By The Book | WORD | Joseph Beth

Or from other online venues:

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | Books-A-Million | iBooks | Powells

And you can add it on:

Goodreads

OKAY BYE

*uploads self to Internet*

Time for another Monday critique session. Are they helpful? I hope they are.

Here’s how this works:

Today? We’re gonna hash out characters. Do you have a character in your WIP (work in progress) that’s just not working? Or a character that you love but others are having problems connecting to? Whatever the reason, here’s a good place to dissect some characters.

Way this works is: in the comment section, give us ~100 words (keep it tidy) about a character you want critiqued. Tell us about that character — wants, fears, the intended arc for that character, etc. — and then some folks can critique that character or ask some questions.

Then the dissection can begin.

But, of course, the rule always applies:

If you put your character out there to be dissected —

You must also dissect someone else’s character.

Quid pro quo and all that.

Be constructive instead of destructive.

Don’t be jerks.

Be awesome instead.

Get to critiquing.

YES, JEEZ, I KNOW, last week, no flash fiction challenge showed up.

This one below was supposed to, but I was traveling and the post failed to fire for reasons unknown — and I was unable to properly troubleshoot whilst in the sun-humped cactusland of Phoenix, Arizona. And I would’ve posted late, but this is a good enough challenge I wanted to grant it the full week that it properly deserves.

That said, we’re back!

And we’re back with a title mixup challenge.

Here’s how this works:

You pick one item from each table. You can use a random number generator to do so, or grab your nearest d20 and get rolling. You mash Column X with Column Y and you get yourself a title to use.

You can modify that title a tiny bit — permutations allowed are adding “the” and making a word plural or non-plural as you see fit. But that’s it. Don’t fidget too much, goddamnit.

Examples might be:

The Dismal Warbler!

God’s Own Testmaker!

The Radioactive Mummy!

And so forth.

You’ve got 1500 words this go around. Write it up at your blog post or other online space, and make sure we have a link in the comments so we can read it. Due by Friday the 12th, noon EST.

Get to randomizing, folks.

Column X

1. Red
2. Executioner’s
3. Madness of
4. Fist Full of
5. Termagant’s
6. Distant
7. Undying
8. Forgotten
9. Unholy
10. Stolen
11. Five Days of the
12. Bloody
13. Doc Gurley’s
14. Whispering
15. Back Country
16. Dismal
17. God’s Own
18. Cleansing
19. Radioactive
20. Neon

Column Y

1. Warbler
2. Cobblers
3. Expanse
4. Mummy
5. Lockbox
6. Testmaker
7. Bridesmaid
8. Jeweler
9. Monster
10. Bullets
11. Dreamscape
12. Sands
13. Villanelle
14. Dingo
15. Junction
16. Straitjacket
17. Trenches
18. Hearts
19. Brains
20. Cartographer

Various quickie updates, for those who care to have them:

• I asked Scott Sigler if he wanted to take a look at my upcoming novel, ZER0ES (where hackers fight a sinister, self-aware NSA surveillance program), and he said, “Sure, kid, whatever,” and then he patted me on the head and gave my beard a lucky rub and then danced back into the forest from whence he came. Well, he has once more returned from the briar and he has given me not one blurb but, in fact, several of them. In fact, he blurbed the book while drinking whisky, and so the blurbs… they sort of degenerate quickly. He has posted the results of this drunken blurbing for all to behold. I laughed so hard at this until I realized the one about pooping might accidentally make it onto the book. *hurriedly emails the editor*

• (Fine, jeez, if you want the actual blurb, I think this is the one you want: “ZERØES turns ones and zeroes into pure gold — Wendig hacks the action thriller.” — Scott Sigler, New York Times best-selling author. Thanks to Scott, who rules.)

• As a sidenote, while he was reading ZER0ES on the plane ride into Phoenix ComicCon, I was coincidentally reading his newest, ALIVE — a head-trip YA thriller about a group of teens who wake up in coffins in a strange place and have to survive and figure out what the unmerciful crap is going on. It’s weird and awesome. I like to think of it as LORD OF THE FLIES mashed up with HELLRAISER. That comes out later this month so go make with the grabby-grabby.

• Also speaking of Herr Doktor Sigler, he recorded a podcast whilst at PHXCC with me and Delilah S. Dawson, and the three of us sit and chitter-chatter about being YA authors who also sometimes say really inappropriate things in public and in our books and oops is that bad? I’ll drop a link to the podcast when it emerges from the Internet the way Godzilla emerges from the briny sea.

• Storybundle! A dozen e-books on writing by authors like Bob Mayer, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith and yours truly. Set a price. Determine how much of that price goes toward bundler, author, and charity. You’ve got less than 24 hours left on the clock to nab it.

• Atlanta Burns is on sale at Amazon along with a whoa-dang host of other great YA books — Gwenda Bond’s Girl on a Wire, Sarah Fine’s Sanctum series, Christina Farley’s Gilded series, and more.

• Fantasy Faction’s Dan Hanks did a very kind review of Under the Empyrean Sky — you can read the whole review here, but if you’re looking for a snippet: “Under the Empyrean Sky is that most wondrous of things – an intimate tale, set against an epic backdrop that leaves you feeling as though you’ve experienced a story far grander than the words on the page actually convey. In that respect, Star Wars: Aftermath is in great hands. And as for The Heartland Trilogy, I absolutely can’t wait to see what happens next.” You can nab the first Heartland book right here.

• Some folks have said that I should talk more about the books I blurb on here, and to that end I totally agree, so let’s do that, yeah? I blurbed three books that landed very recently…

• Peter Clines: The Fold. “The Fold is that rare thriller that always keeps just one step ahead of the reader…a crackling, electric read.” A group of scientists find a way to bend space and create a teleportation channel, except, oops, they don’t know how they did it and hilarity I MEAN TERROR swiftly ensues. The third act is gonzo amazing good times.

• Eva Darrows (aka Hilary Monahan): The Awesome. “Hilarious and twisted, this is one bad-ass jump-kick of a book. Moveover Buffy, because monster hunter Maggie Cunningham is in town.” If you want to meet the little sister of Miriam Black, this is probably your book. A sex-positive, ass-kicking YA heroine? Check the book out. (Also one of those rare books that tries to be funny and actually does it.)

• Richard Thomas: Disintegration. “Sweet hot hell, Richard Thomas writes like a man possessed, a man on fire, a guy with a gun to his head. And you’ll read Disintegration like there’s a gun to yours, too. It’s a twisted masterpiece.” This is just a fucked up book, folks. Like, in the best way possible. Noir thriller. Go grabby. It’s like, $2.99, to boot.

• Last but not least, hey, I’m going to San Diego Comic-con! I’m doing one panel there that’s some kind of [edit: secret thing]. More details as I know ’em.