In writing and in dispensing my (very dubious, probably shady) writing advice, I am often keen to note that ideas are bullshit. Most writers treat them like precious gems when really, ideas are like costume jewelry: it’s all about how you wear them. It comes up because a lot of younger or untested writers I meet are all about The Idea. And they ascribe failures to finish with failing to have a Good Idea. They sometimes don’t even start to write because they cannot even summon a Good Idea. And the reverse can be true, too: sometimes, The Idea feels like enough. These writers have An Idea, and they’ll tell it to you, and then it’s like — well, they’re done. That’s it. They have ideated. The cool part is over. Lightning struck! They are complete.
But again, the idea is a seed, that’s it. Ideas are certainly useful, but only so far. A good idea will not be saved by poor execution, but a bad idea can be saved by excellent execution. Even simple, pedestrian ideas can be made sublime in the hands of a powerful craftsman or artist. Not every idea needs to be revolutionary. Every idea needn’t be that original — I don’t mean to suggest the plagiarism is the way to go, I only mean in the general sense, it’s very difficult (and potentially impossible) to think of a truly original story idea that hasn’t in some form been told before. The originality in a narrative comes from you, the author, the artist. The originality comes out in the execution.
It is there in the effort.
(And any writer or artist will surely experience the fact that the execution of an idea helps to spawn more new ideas within the seedbed of that singular garden. Put differently, driving across country is so much more than plugging the directions into Google Maps — when the rubber meets road, when you meet obstacles, when there are sights to see, you change the journey and the journey changes you, because choices must be made.)
And herein lies the problem with the sudden surge and interest in artificial intelligence. AI-generated creativity isn’t creativity. It is all hat, no cowboy: all idea, no execution. It in fact relies on the obsession with, and fetishization of, THE IDEA. It’s the core of every get-rich-quick scheme, the basis of every lazy entrepreneur who thinks he has the Next Big Thing, the core of every author or artist or creator who is a “visionary” who has all the vision but none of the ability to execute upon that vision. Hell, it’s the thing every writer has heard from some jabroni who tells you, “I got this great idea, you write it, we’ll split the money 50/50, boom.” It is the belief that The Idea is of equal or greater importance than the effort it takes to make That Idea a reality.
AI-generation relies on the idea, and executes upon it. (Often poorly — it can’t draw hands, it can’t help plagiarizing, it can’t not spit out the biases of its makers. Though note: it’ll get much, much better going forward. Its errors will become more invisible, and thus, more pernicious until it’s too late.) This sudden interest in AI has no interest in work. It has all the interest in doubling down on the fetishization of idea — like Tony Stark or Shuri in the MCU, all you have to do is — y’know, besides being rich — tell your free-roaming artificial intelligence friend to simulate a wormhole or design a new weapon, and it’ll do it. Who needs actual science? Who cares about effort? Just give Ultron the instructions and he’ll make it so. Who needs execution? Who needs institutional knowledge? Who needs hands-on experience? All you need is A GREAT IDEA and COOL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and you’re off to the races, baby.
When it comes to making art and telling stories, the working writer and the working artist know the idea is really just a phantom. It’s something under the floorboards or behind the drywall. Present, yes, maybe even foundational, but the idea isn’t the house. Further, it’s certainly not the home. It’s more than just the keystone, more even than the structure you build around it. It’s in the choices made, it’s in the people who live in that house, the stories they experience inside it, and though this metaphor is definitely running away with itself, hopefully my point is clear — storytelling isn’t just a structure. It isn’t just physics, or a spreadsheet to fill out, or a series of data points on a graph.
And this is where I point you to Lincoln Michel’s very very good “The Unnecessary Is The Only Thing Necessary In Art” — while not about artificial intelligence, I think it plugs in a bit in that there is this occasional and maybe even increasing view that somehow there are Essential Components to storytelling, that if you plug in the right Plot Variables that is how the Art Calculator makes narrative. But story is far deeper, far stranger than all that, and it is certainly more than just Canonical Information or a Sequence of Events. Artificial intelligence, though, would view storytelling through this lens: it would distill it down to wires and pipes. It wants very hard to generate a house, but has no idea how to make it a home.
Michel correctly notes: “But the best way to experience art is to experience it. Not to spend your time debating if every shot or sentence or lyric is necessary. What is the point of a flower in a painting? What is the necessary number of verses in a song? What is the utility of the archaic torso of Apollo?” And again, he’s talking about a whole different situation — this puritanical (and if I may note, fascist-adjacent) notion that sex in storytelling shouldn’t be present unless it’s necessary. (And how often do fascist-flavored critics also say this about LGBT content in books, or quote-unquote “woke” content in stories, where they say something like, Oh, I don’t mind seeing gay [or transgender, Black, etc.] characters in a story, but only when it’s necessary. As if there exists a plot equation that can be balanced and answered by the inclusion of certain diverse content and without that particular equation such content is now “unnecessary.”
As this is a post apparently in love with digression, I also make note of the great effort that is going into Book Banning across school districts nationwide, even in the blue-ish area in which I live, where the once-vaunted school district Central Bucks is now reviewing a number of sex- and LGBT- and POC-positive books to pull them out of school libraries so kids cannot access them. This shitty toxic pissypants Moms-For-Liberty-fed bullshit will harm students who need to see themselves represented and who need other kids to see them represented in books, and you’ll note that there is a similar puritanical vein shot through all of this, wherein it is believed that sex is not “necessary,” that LGBT content is not “necessary,” that reading about racism is not “necessary.” Or they use that most common of words — this material is (gasp) inappropriate. (I also note that Nazi efforts to ban and burn books began in part with the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a Berlin-based institution of sexological studies that was LGBT-and-intersex-positive and that also offered access to contraceptives. The attacks on LGBT citizens, on their rights, on drag shows, on abortion, it’s the same fascist playbook run by the Nazis. Just so y’know.)
(And if you don’t think artificial intelligence couldn’t become very fascist, very fast, well, you’re not paying attention.)
To loop this all back around — because, oof, I didn’t necessarily expect to land on NAZIS in this post, though I suppose in our current climate I probably should’ve figured on landing there eventually — there exists this core notion that art and narrative are just numerical expressions, that they begin with an Idea and that storytelling is just stringing yarn along a series of thumbtacks on a board, and that there’s only value in having the idea and no value in learning how to tell the story you want to tell. We can cut out the unnecessary parts, we can let artificial intelligence handle the rest, and all we have to do is feed it our Very Good Idea. We don’t even have to split the profits with some stupid fucking “author” anymore! We can just have ideas and that is all that matters! We’ll burp them up into the world, and an AI will run with them, creating only Necessary Fiction that has the Proper Ratios in it. A perfect narrative gumbo, every time. (Admittedly, with too many fingers and too much plagiarism.)
WHAT A GLORIOUS DAY.
Except, of course, you and me, we know that’s all bullshit, right? We know that stories are more than just their inception. Stories are the author. Stories are the execution. Stories are in the human experiences, the unexpected parts, and as Michel notes, the unnecessary portions. They’re the most flavorful bits. Everything isn’t just pure protein. The flavor is in the fat, okay?
So, fuck off, AI.
Fuck off, AI storytellers.
Fuck off, AI generated images.
We must be shut of the obsession with Idea.
It’s just idea, small-i. You’re not done when you have an idea. You’ve barely even begun. The wonder is in what comes after. The wonder is in the work.
(Related: Clarkesworld post — “A Concerning Trend” — about how they’re suddenly deluged with AI-generated bullshit, which is, I fear, only going to get worse from here.)
(Also, read WANDERERS and WAYWARD, because hey, they’re both about artificial intelligence. Also, pandemics. But definitely AI, and what happens when you give AI a whole lot of power and rely on it to solve your problems! Oops!)
This is a post about social media, which is the most boring kind of post. But for writers in particular, it’s an essential one. And here is why: we are at a time when traditional media is a fucking shitshow. In general, sure, but also, specifically as it relates to book stuff. You’ll find far less book coverage than you used to in years past, in part because — at least, as I understand it — a lot of outlets have reduced the staff dedicated to book-related and publishing-related topics, sometimes cutting down to the bone. Unless you’re in the one percent of authors who sell a WHOLE LOTTA BOOKS or have a book that meets a particular threshold of that hard-to-define “buzz,” (or you’re “someone who knows someone”), you’re not really going to get out there with book announcements or cover reveals or excerpts. You might hit a few end-of-the-year or beginning-of-the-year lists but… most authors don’t, won’t, can’t.
As such, publishers are leaning harder into social media as an avenue to champion books. Thing is, they’ve already leaned pretty pretty hard into social media over the years, and it makes sense: for a long time, social media has seemed like this fertile ground of virality, right? Authors get on, authors make some noise, they get followers, the followers are readers, the readers buy the books, and holy shit, it’s free? Manna from Heaven, and it doesn’t cost the publisher a dime?
One problem: it doesn’t really work like that.
As I’ve noted in the past, social media doesn’t sell books. Okay, fine, it does, but not at the level we all want it to. It moves a copy here, a copy there, ten copies, hopefully more. And that’s good. Because in a sense, every book is a pebble thrown into the pond, and it makes ripples. Ripples (readers new and familiar) reach farther shores, meaning, those readers tell other readers, and that’s a good thing. It’s not some kind of HOLY SHIT YOUR BOOK HAS GONE VIRAL kinda thing, but it’s a slow and steady and reliable way to earn readership.
But… publishing doesn’t really crave the slow and steady. Some publishers are good with it! Some have a wiser eye and recognize the value of a long tail. But a lot of publishers are just stuffing a catapult full of spaghetti and hoping some of it sticks to some wall, somewhere, anywhere.
I’ve long noted that part of the real value of social media for writers is the community that comes from it — a community not just of readers, but a professional one, too. We’re lonely little weirdos, and it’s nice to have a virtual watercooler-slash-campfire around which to gather. We can hang with other writers, agents, editors, and from there, artists and film people and TV people and comics folk and — well, so on and so forth. A creative community forms from this, not one that’s ever a monoculture, but that’s a good thing. It’s good that it’s this unruly, shapeless thing, because that’s what leads to more interesting friendships. (And community is, ultimately, about these friendships. Fuck anyone who talks about this as if it’s about the “connections.” Said it before, we’ll say it again, but people are not just rungs in a ladder.)
So, does it work this way still?
Is social media serving the writer well? In… any direction?
If I had a button marked “sad farty trombone sound,” I would now press it.
I might even press it two, three times. Shit, I might lean an elbow on it for a few minutes, really let it rip.
It ain’t good out there.
Social media is a fucking turdfire for writers right now.
Why is this? Part of it is what Cory Doctorow brilliantly calls the “enshittification” factor — read about it here. The basic gist is, when a platform needs users, it serves the users. Then the users become the product, and are abused in favor or larger businesses who can use the users in proxy, and then inevitably, the platform fails the businesses along with the users and the whole thing violently diarrheas the bed. It is, one could argue, the core problem of unfettered and unchallenged capitalism: businesses grow like bacteria without competition, and soon they burst free of the petri dish, after which they infect everyone and everything, killing their hosts, and that’s the end of that. Our current mode of apocalyptic capitalism requires unrestrained growth to reward the wealthy at the top, which is ultimately impossible, and it fucks a whole lot of people over. Except the really wealthy at the top, who fuck off to their rocketships and moonbases after they ruin everything around them on Earth.
(That paragraph got a little out of hand, but you see what I’m saying, and more importantly, what the wise Mister Doctorow was saying.)
We are definitely at the part of social media where these platforms have all fully enshittified themselves almost in grand simultaneity.
Which is to say, they are bad for users, and in particular, bad for writers.
Let’s talk about how each platform is doing here.
Twitter
Even before Elon Musk took over, Twitter was a less-than-ideal place to try to hang your creative shingle. From uncharitable misreads to harassment campaigns, the waters were already chummed with blood. Still, Twitter made sense to writers. It was made of words! And we’re very lonely people! So a platform where we were able to microburst our random communiques into the world using words (and occasionally animated GIFs) worked well for us. It was fun, despite descending slowly into horror over the years.
Now, though, woof. Where to start?
First, the site defaults to the FYP (For You Page), which is an algorithmic regurgitate slurry where you can scroll and see page after page of tweets from literally no one you actually follow. It’s all weird promoted accounts, tweets “liked” by someone you do follow, or followed by someone you follow, or weird shit like “because you follow Tom Hanks, here is a tweet by an alt-right hair product influencer because the algorithm probably saw some tenuous digital connection between those two things, so congrats, here’s a stupid tweet.” I follow a lot of writers, but does the FYP give me a lot of tweets about books and writing? It fucking does not. It’s just a river of weird garbage and angry news stuff and not nearly enough WRITER STUFF.
(And of course, this only juices the algorithm further. It serves you a robo-selected slice of this garbage, which you must ingest because it’s allthereis, and then the algorithm sees you slurping the twitter-gruel and thinks, AH GOOD, THEY MUST BE ENJOYING WHAT I’VE SLUICED INTO THEIR OPEN BEAKS, and it turns up the Sluice Knob to 11 because surely you want more, more, more.)
(It also seems that posts with links seem to be downgraded in terms of visibility. Which sucks when you want people to click a link to your book. Or, ahem ahem, to your really cool blog because blogs are still totally a thing, shut up.)
Second, Musk’s new “stick-on scratch-and-sniff verification check” reportedly is how you juggle your tweets back into the algorithm’s good graces. Regular blue-checks (aka, the ones that are not a reward but were supposed to tell people you were really who you said you were) have also been reportedly downgraded in the eyes of the Almighty Algorithm. So, if you’re a real person, fuck you. If you’re some jabroni with eight bucks a month (or eleven bucks or whatever it costs now) to spare, congrats, here’s your megaphone. (Also, do not pay for that service. Love yourself more than that.)
Third, you’re of course trying to get traction next to some of the worst people in the world, who have all been invited back to the platform by Musk. Y’know, Musk, who also gladly replies to alt-right weirdos named “Catturd,” taking their complaints and eagerly noting he’ll “look into it.”
Fourth, the platform is starting to break. It’s functionality is erratic as hell — this week has been stable when I’ve been there for the most part, but last several weeks, my mention tabs have been broken to the point where it was only showing me stuff from weeks ago, and wouldn’t update at all. Sometimes I get spinning icons or error messages. I suppose it’s not surprising, given how many people That Dude has fired. I think the janitor runs everything now. *receives note* Sorry, I regret to inform you they fired the janitor.
Just from a personal POV, while I’m not tweeting very much, when I do venture and Tweet Some Bullshit, it’s barely making a dent.
Given that the writer’s greatest challenge is Achieving Visibility, and the writer’s greatest enemy is Obscurity, that makes Twitter pretty shit for creative types right now. And it only seems to be getting worse.
Instagram
Instagram is not entirely terrible.
Obviously I don’t like the parent company, but as a social media site it still brings me a modicum of joy to be there and scroll through photos of books, pets, and food. I can easily turn off unwanted FYP reels (and honestly, I think they made a huge mistake in their “pivot to video,” just jfc, just let TikTok be TikTok). Engagement there is still pretty good — a recent cover reveal for BLACK RIVER ORCHARD had (though it’s hard to measure precisely) roughly four times the engagement at IG than the post rec’d at Twitter, and that’s with a fraction of the followers. (~180k at Twitter, ~14k at Instagram.)
Thing is, though, IG is a visual medium, and we’re word jerks, so it doesn’t feel as natural, and is nowhere near as talky — plus, it’s hard to have actual conversations on IG. You can thread a couple replies but it’s not as easy to read or as encouraging for longer-term engagement. It’s a “drop a post and walk away as the building explodes” kind of place, not somewhere you go to to chat.
And links are hard to post there, and there’s no virality via a “reboost” function — which is probably good in that it cuts down on the total noise, but it’s harder for users to repost something they like without using a separate app for it.
Great for keeping in touch with weird family members, maybe, and also not bad for maintaining some communities, but for a long time it was pretty shitty for writers. You’d make a public page and then they’d want you to pay to boost any of it, so you could only really reach a fraction of your actual followers. (In a sense, the Twitter Blue checkmark bullshit is similar — if you want to reach all your followers, you gotta pay up. “Sure would be a shame if something happened to your engagement,” the digital goon says, slapping a blackjack into his open palm.) I’ve heard that FB has maybe loosened its grip on this a bit? I cannot confirm, but I know some writers who have reported increased engagement with their public page followers again.
Still, FB sucks, and Zuck sucks, so, I dunno.
TikTok
I’m not on there, so I don’t have a good watermark. It certainly seems like it’s good for the book community, what with the existence of BookTok going strong there and helping create displays in bookstores big and small. And some writers have really done well over there. For my mileage it, like Goodreads, is better off serving readers rather than writers — nobody really wants us over there gallumphing about awkwardly to music while trying to shill our books. That feels like a fundamental misread of what makes BookTok cool? I dunno. YMMV!
But I know there are also privacy concerns too, so, shrug. You do you.
Tumblr
Tumblr certainly seems to be a bit resurgent? Also very word-based, blog-based, has an easy signal boosting function. Feels useful for writers but I haven’t been over there and am wary of committing excess text to a space I don’t really own. But maybe a good place for reposted content? Dunno!
Newsletters
Newsletters are great for writers, but only for them to speak to existing readership-slash-fanbases. A good way to let the people who like you know where you’ll be, what you’re doing, what books of yours are coming out, what you’re eating, what cryptid you just summoned to eat your stupid neighbors, whatever. Not ideal for earning new readership and creating public visibility.
(I don’t have a newsletter but this site serves as one.)
Unfortunately some newsletter services cost you money, and it’s hard to know what the return is on that. You’ll also likely find that the “open and read” rate can dip fast and stay low, because newsletters arrive via email, and if your email is like my email, it’s a BIG OL’ SHIT RIVER. It’s a lot of noise, and newsletters tend to get lost there. As such I can only subscribe to a few before it gets overwhelming, but maybe that’s just my completely broken brain.
Mastodon
I think it has a shot, and I know some writers seem to be doing okay there in terms of engagement — it’s a little quieter but fairly easy to use. Less easy to understand, maybe, given that the diffuse nature of the servers is confusing. Further, moderation varies wildly from server to server. Some places seem to have a lock on it, whereas others have users experiencing some pretty heinous shit, often out of nowhere. Hard to judge the entire experience because it isn’t an entire experience — it’s a series of fragmented shards, and you don’t carry your following/followed with you.
Find me there at mastodon-dot-social — @chuckwendig.
(Engagement on that cover reveal was… fine? ~56 likes, ~16 signal boosts, at ~11k followers. Could be better. Pretty quiet, but doable.)
Hive
I liked Hive at the start. Even despite the security concerns it had some stuff I really liked, and the community was peppy, and the engagement high. But then they shut down to fix some stuff, and came back weeks later with lowered engagement — engagement that I think was further hampered by the fact that some of the things that did work and were cool no longer work at all. And they’re things that actually foster engagement, so it feels like salted earth. I hope it comes back and does well, honestly, because it’s a neat platform that has (or at least had) the “stickiness” of Twitter, but right now, it’s kind of a mess, and also has become a ghost town. They also really need a desktop app.
I find I’m checking it less and less. Which is sad! I wanna keep the party going.
I’m there as @chuckwendig.
(The cover reveal over there, posted a week ago, was somewhat peppy, actually — even with quieter vibes, it had ~150 likes with ~6k followers, vs ~370 likes at ~180k followers. So that’s really not bad. Better than on Mastodon, I think. As a sidenote, reason I’m estimating these numbers a bit is because they seem to fluctuate, particularly on Twitter.)
Post.news
Ennnh. Ennh?
If you take Hive and Post, it’s like Twitter bifurcated its psyche into two spaces: the first, the fun fanbasey wacky goodtimes half, and the second, the SRS BZNS news half. Post is droll and dry and all the global misery of Twitter without any of the fun. It’s not a bad place to get caught up on the news, honestly, but for writers I don’t see it doing much. At least not for writers who aren’t writing the SRS BZNS. For us silly story jugglers, I’m not seeing it really catch fire. It’s hard to see engagement and measure it, which is really a death knell for these platforms — we really want to see who’s liking things, who’s reboosting them, and so forth. It should be as easy as possible and not in any way difficult.
(The cover reveal over there had little engagement.)
Spoutible
It’s new! It’s basically Twitter! Its tweets are called, uhh, spouts? Which, as a writer, I hate a whole lot because it just sounds weird. But I also get it, okay, fine, spouting off. Whatever, I’ll cope.
It’s very new, so I have nothing to really note here — I’m there @chuckwendig. It’s buggy and sluggish right now. (Or, if you prefer, buggish and sluggy. Which is now the name of my new series of kids’ picture books, look for them in 2030.) Christopher Bouzy is, I believe, fairly trustworthy in that he’s the figure behind BotSentinel, a service known for figuring out who’s real, who’s not, and identifying/tracking harassment on social media.
YMMV, and I know it’s not fully open yet.
The Internet In General
Certainly there are other social media places out there — forums and the like. But the thing that strikes me is, it feels a little like the Internet is breaking. The wheels, coming off. Email sucks. Google results are increasingly awful, full of gibberish, half of which seems generated by some gabbling AI ChatGPT clone. And of course that’s the other thing — the “release the dogs” aspect of AI suddenly intruding all aspects of our digital lives feels like the whole thing is doubling down on Doctorow’s enshittification theory, that it’s all just getting worse and breaking faster. Links going to nowhere, services failing users, hacks exposing massive swaths of user information. It’s not great, Bob.
Conclusions
First conclusion is, this post is way too fucking long.
Second conclusion is, it’s unclear how much of this even matters. I mean, it matters in the sense that our communities are in massive disarray. We don’t have them as writers anymore, not entirely. They’ve been chipped away at, fractured, left in cookie crumbles. There are writers I’m friends with who I haven’t seen online in months. Sometimes it’s because they left, other times because The Fucking Algorithm hasn’t shown them to me, sequestering them to some dark and distant corner of the social media manse. So, it sucks.
Thing is, in terms of actually selling books and earning readership, it’s bad to lose that, but there was always the question of how truly necessary any of this was. It seems to me — and no, this is not universal, but it’s pretty solid — that the books that do well are the books that publishers got behind. Yes, some writers did so well on social media they earned followings and readerships — I’m among them, I think, though it’s certainly not 1:1 where every follower becomes a reader. But you look at some of the biggest books of the year and track the authorial social media presence… it can be low, even non-existent. Books don’t require social media to exist. They require publishers who believe the books and then choose to manifest that belief with effort and money.
Which really, is the tricky part, because a lot of this feels like, “Hey, if you wanna solve climate change, you better do your part, citizen.” Which isn’t wrong. Of course you need to do your part to not fuck up the planet. BUT, it’s also not us individually doing Most Of The Up-Fucking Of Said Planet. It’s giant systems and corporations in place that are very hard to dismantle individually — and with publishing, it’s also very hard for us individually to magically make a book a huge or even moderate success. We can do our parts. We should do our parts. But our part isn’t the make-or-break component. That lies with publishers, and not even publishers on social media, but publishers working the well-trod paths with bookstores and distributors and relying on old-school advertisements and such. Social media in this sense has been a bit of a stalking horse for publishers — something to hide behind without investing in any make or break aspect of it. If it works, yay, we did it. If it doesn’t, well, that’s just social media, man.
So, really, no meaningful conclusions or actions to be had here except — well, shit, it’s hard to be a writer at any time in history and in my opinion it’s only getting harder, because the internet is increasingly noisy and increasingly shitty. Which is also maybe me just getting older and more resistant to new things, but I also don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way? Sound off if you have further thoughts to add to this conversation.
I’m gonna stop typing now because this really has gone on too long. I mean, WTF, Wendig, shut up.
ANYWAY HEY HI buy my books. And leave reviews. Because otherwise I die in the howling pit of obscurity, and that would be sad. For me, at least.
The Book of Accidents is five bucks for your various E-MACHINE CYBERBOOK platforms. Why is this? I don’t know. How long will it last? I’ve zero idea. But it’s true right now, at the moment I type this, and you’ll find this to be the case at Amazon and Kobo and B&N and Apple and all that.
So, enter the old house, find your way through the boulder field, down to the old coal mine. Something waits you there. And it’s $4.99.
Stand fast root, bear well top Pray the God send us a howling good crop. Every twig, apples big. Every bough, apples now.
— Apple Wassail song, 19th century Sussex
This is the apple in your hand.
Some would say it is so red that it looks black, but that’s not quite right. It’s the color of wine and offal, of liver soaked in Pinot Noir. Bruise-dark and blood-bright.
The skin shows little russeting, if any. But it is home to a peppering of lenticels—the little white dots you sometimes see on appleskin. These lenticels feel somehow deeper than the skin itself. As if you are staring into a thing that is nothing as much as it is something: an object of depth, of breadth, like a hole in the universe. In this way the lenticels are like the stars of a moonless evening.
The skin is smooth and cold, always cold. It is a round apple, not oblong, not tall, but also not squat. The Platonic ideal of an apple shape, perhaps: roughly symmetrical, broad in the shoulders, narrow toward the calyx. The apple is heavy, too. Dense-feeling. Heavy enough to crack a window. Or break a nose.
Even before you bite it, a scent rises to meet you. It’s the smell of roses—not unusual, because apples are related to the rose. Same family, in fact: Roseceae.
What is unusual is the moment, a moment so fast you will disregard it, where the smell makes you feel something in the space between your heart and your stomach: a feeling of giddiness and loss in equal measure. In that feeling is the dying of summer, the rise of fall, the coming of winter, and threaded throughout, a season of funerals and flowers left on a grave. But again, that moment is so fast, you cannot hold onto it. It is gone, like a dream upon waking.
Of course, what matters most is the eating.
In the first bite, the skin pops under your teeth—the same pop you’d feel biting into a tightly-skinned sausage. The flesh has a hard texture, and if you were to cut a slice you’d find it would not bend but rather, it would break like a chip of slate snapping in half. That snap is a satisfying sensation: a tiny tectonic reverberation felt all the way to the elbow.
In the chew, the apple is crisp, resistant to its destruction, with a crunch so pleasurable it lights up some long-hidden atavistic artifact in your brain, a part that eons ago took great joy from crushing small bones between your teeth. The flesh is juicy; it floods the mouth, refusing to be dammed by teeth or lips, inevitably dripping from your chin. But for all its juiciness, too, the tannins are high—and the apple feels like it’s wicking the moisture out of your mouth, as if it’s taking something from you even as you take from it.
The taste itself is a near-perfect balance of tartness and sweetness—that sour, tongue-scrubbing feel of a pineapple, but one that has first been run through a trench of warm honey. The skin, on the other hand, is quite bitter, but there’s something to that, too. The way it competes with the tart and the sweet. The way how the most popular perfumes are ones that contain unpleasant, foul odors secreted away: aromatics of rot, bile, rancid fat, bestial musk, an ancient, compelling foulness, from the faraway time when crunching those little bones made us so very happy. And so very powerful.
The bitterness of the skin is a necessary acrimony: a reminder that nothing good can last, that things die, that the light leaves us all eventually. That the light leaves the world. A hole in the universe.
It speaks to you, this bitterness.
It speaks to some part of you that likes it.
Because part of you does like it.
Doesn’t it?
***
And so, the cover for BLACK RIVER ORCHARD is revealed.
It comes out September 26th, 2023.
The cover was by Regina Flath, art director at Del Rey, she is bad-ass, and the cover is bad-ass, and I love it. (You can find her and follow her on Instagram here and on Twitter here.)
You can pre-order a copy here at PRH, or from these places: Doylestown Bookshop, Bookshop.org, Indiebound, B&N, Amazon, though as always, the best place to buy books is from your local bookstore. Booksellers are book wizards and you need to feed their magical hungers lest they turn on us all.
(I note too that it looks like B&N is doing a preorder sale. You get 25% off if you use the code PREORDER25.)
I’ll certainly talk more about the book as it gets closer to release. As for now, well. If you’d like to know what the book is about — I got you covered, friend.
Official description:
A small town is transformed by dark magic when seven strange trees begin bearing magical apples in this masterpiece of horror from the bestselling author of Wanderers and The Book of Accidents.
It’s autumn in the town of Harrow, but something else is changing in the town besides the season.
Because in that town there is an orchard, and in that orchard, seven most unusual trees. And from those trees grows a new sort of apple: Strange, beautiful, with skin so red it’s nearly black.
Take a bite of one of these apples and you will desire only to devour another. And another. You will become stronger. More vital. More yourself, you will believe. But then your appetite for the apples and their peculiar gifts will keep growing—and become darker.
This is what happens when the townsfolk discover the secret of the orchard. Soon it seems that everyone is consumed by an obsession with the magic of the apples… and what’s the harm, if it is making them all happier, more confident, more powerful?
And even if buried in the orchard is something else besides the seeds of this extraordinary tree: a bloody history whose roots reach back to the very origins of the town.
But now the leaves are falling. The days grow darker. It’s harvest time, and the town will soon reap what it has sown.
…
Anyway.
Hope you consider pre-ordering it.
Hope you consider spreading the word, too, while you’re at it.
That’s it, really, that’s the post — WANDERERS is on sale! $2.99 at your major e-book platforms. So if you haven’t checked it out, now’s yer chance. And if you have checked it out and care to spread the word, that’d be awfully nifty.
Aaaand of course if you do check it out, especially at this oh-so-shiny price point, it would be utter aces of you to leave a review somewhere. A nice review. A pretty, precious review. *pets the review* *stares at you*
(Plus, if you read WANDERERS, then you have the sequel, WAYWARD, waiting for you. In the darkness. With a crowbar. I didn’t give it the crowbar. It just took it. I don’t make the rules. Just do what the book says.)
Let’s see, what else is going on? Anything? I finished the second draft of BLACK RIVER ORCHARD and sent it off, so that’s nice. Did I ever mention I was on THE DARK WORD, Philip Fracassi’s podcast about horror and horror writing? It was a blast and a half. A really great conversation. Go give a listen. And I was on Dead Headspace, which was also a hoot (with guest host Mercedes Yardley), and also on Ben Blacker’s podcast, The Writer’s Panel? I think I mentioned this stuff but the pandemic has chewed even more holes into my brain.
