I see an article is going around, apparently from the RWR (the Romance Writers Report, which is connected to the RWA), that talks about how authors should deal with controversial topics — which is to say, the article seems to suggest that they should take a very soft, inoffensive, middle-of-the-road, milquetoasty approach. Just smile, it seems to say. Think of England.

Here, you’ll see author Racheline Maltese offering up a few snapshots of the article.

(I don’t have the original article to go on.)

(I don’t suspect this is an RWA “official” stance.)

(I don’t even know who wrote it.)

You’ll note that it mentions both gay marriage and racism via Ferguson.

Given that romance writers are generally women, it sounds troublingly like asking them to be more lady-like and not speak about issues that would trouble others — do not, it suggests, get all uppity and think that people want to hear your opinion on issues of import. You might further infer from there that women aren’t… something enough to opine such important matters. Not smart enough? Not savvy enough? Not man enough?

Here I’m aware that there’s a danger of me squeezing myself sideways into this conversation, as I am a) not a woman and b) not a romance writer, and you’d probably be well served by going and reading a lot of the discussion around the topic via women authors who are far smarter and better connected to this subject than I am (again, Racheline Maltese’ feed is a good place to dive into and branch out of this subject). And I know that there’s always a danger that when I get up on this rickety soapbox I’ve made out of old toilets and broken chains of binary code that it seems like AH FINALLY THE MANS HAVE SPOKEN, and then I wave my plunger — er, scepter — at you and everything feels altogether more official. I also know that I can say crazy shit and people will applaud, and maybe that’s not a luxury everybody has.

Hopefully, this doesn’t feel like that, and if it does, I’m sorry.

That said, I think there’s a larger, broader question about if any writer of any genre should speak out about reportedly controversial subjects.

And, my answer to that is, holy shit, yes.

With the caveats of:

a) if you want to.

b) if you can do it without being horrible to other people.

Nobody should make you speak out about controversial subjects. It can be uncomfortable to engage in that kind of conversation online — you might end up with an Asshole Magnet firmly bolted to your forehead. Some people’s milkshakes bring the boys to the yard, but other people’s milkshake bring all the trolls to the Twitter conversation. You might not be up for stomping that many ants or throwing rocks at wasp nests.

Further, if you do choose to speak out about controversial subjects, just don’t be horrible about it. This is a stickier wicket, of course, because you’re probably always going to be somebody’s asshole in that kind of conversation — I can say, politely as I can muster, “Gay marriage is a civil rights and humans rights issue, please and thank you,” and somebody out there in InternetLand is going to immediately going to think I’m a walking, talking, tweeting, blogging pile of demonic excrement. And the wicket gets even stickier when women and LGBT authors and persons of color have long been told to play nice, don’t get angry, don’t stand up too tall or too loud, and my intent here is not to slick this slope with Astroglide so you zip down it right back into the valley of just be nice and sell books. By horrible I mean, outright shitty. I mean, beating people down, or bullying them, or threatening harm. The very nadir of human behavior.

Now, with that said —

Why should authors speak up and speak out?

Because you’re writers, that’s why.

Writers know the power of words. Words change the world. Words have always been more effective at bullets when it comes to changing both the present and the future (and, in some ways, the past) — writing and storytelling have been a part of the human code since we figured out how to mash berries and streak red goop across cave walls with the decisive swipe of one of our hairy thumbs. Words make a difference. Stories move the fucking needle.

Ah, but: will you lose sales?

Could be, rabbit, could be.

But, I want you to ponder:

a) if you lost sales due to your having an opinion (gasp), did you want those sales in the first place?

b) if a reader doesn’t care for you or your opinions, will that reader actually like your book?

c) have you also thought about the sales you may have gained?

Let’s tackle that last one — “c.”

In my experience, having an opinion has lost me a sale here and there. I note this only because once in a while I actually get people saying, “CHAZ WENDING JUST LOST HIMSELF A SALE” and at first I’m like, “Jeez, who the hell is Chaz Wending and do I need to fight him?” but then I’m like, “OHHH they misspelled my name.”

But for every lost sale, I’ve seen more folks say they’ve bought my books because of me having an opinion. People want to read books by human beings, not marketing platforms. Human beings are complicated, sticky, thorny tangles. We’re not advertising robots. We’re not weaponized brands. We’re people, and we have thoughts and feelings and ideas and fears and gasp opinions on the world and other human beings that exist around us. Because we’re all connected, and social media — often thought of as somehow unreal — is just as real as real life and only deepens the connections we experience. We’re more bound up together, not less. (Though in opposition to this I’d also caution you to not place too much actual importance on social media in terms of selling books — it’ll sell them here and there, but I think we often overstate how much social media from the author specifically can sell books. It does. But much of your audience won’t ever be reading your tweets in the first place.)

Even still — sales (gaining or losing) isn’t a good reason to have an opinion online.

Have an opinion because you’re a person.

And you’re a writer, with your own unique means of expressing your feelings.

Don’t be a brand.

Don’t be so hyper-focused on selling your book that you forget to act like a human being. I don’t pay much attention to those writers who just bark out advertisements for their books day in and day out — I just squeegee their greasy spam tracks from my monitor and move on. I do, however, pay attention to writers who are bold enough to be people — that’s not just about them sharing opinions, but just about how they come across online. More like humans, less like SkyNet.

You are more than your book sales.

Speak up and speak out if you so choose.

Or, put your opinions into the work, instead.

You shouldn’t feel pressured to get loud.

But you also shouldn’t feel pressured to be silent, either.

Having an opinion doesn’t give you any authority, no. But it’s one of the milestones of being human. And being a writer ostensibly gives you a way to put those opinions out in an interesting way.

So, should writers have and share opinions on matters both small and uncontroversial? Absolutely. Engage. Talk. Share. Join up with the human experience. Connect in that way if you so choose. Opinions, as the saying goes, are like assholes: we all have them. And it would be weird for you not to have an opinion just as it would be weird if you did not have a butthole. That’s actually how we test for alien marauders, by the way. We scan them at the TSA to see if they have rectal passages. It’s how we know you’re not human — surely we’ve all been there at TSA when a xeno-terrorist suddenly realizes he’s been butthole-scanned and been found lacking, and then his flesh splits and his gelatinous tentacle-body explodes forth in protest and then —

Okay, I think I’ve lost the thread.

And I probably just lost a couple sales, too.

DAMNIT

I knew I was supposed to pay attention to this series of Post-It notes stuck to my monitor: “STOP TALKING ABOUT THE ALIEN NEGA-BUTTHOLE CONSPIRACY; IT REALLY FREAKS PEOPLE OUT.”

I am such a fool.

*hangs head in shame*

[Apologies that this challenge is late — I set the other one to post but, without realizing it, had been logged out and the scheduled posting did not save.]

This challenge? Pretty straightforward.

Pick one of these five randomly generated sentences.

Use the sentence in a flash fiction short story, ~1000 words in length.

Post that story at your online space, and give us a link to that story in the comments below — this story is due by this coming Friday the 13th at noon EST.

Bonus challenge: use more than one of these sentences in the story.

The sentences are:

“The mysterious diary records the voice.”

“The stranger officiates the meal.”

“The shooter says goodbye to his love.”

“A glittering gem is not enough.”

“The memory we used to share is no longer coherent.”

“The old apple revels in its authority.”

“Rock music approaches at high velocity.”

“Sixty-Four comes asking for bread.”

“Abstraction is often one floor above you.”

“The river stole the gods.”

Night Owls bookstore always keeps a light on and evil creatures out. But, as Lauren M. Roy’s thrilling sequel continues, even its supernatural staff isn’t prepared for the dead to come back to life…

Elly grew up training to kill things that go bump in the night, so she’s still getting used to working alongside them. While she’s learned to trust the eclectic group of vampires, Renfields, and succubi at Night Owls bookstore, her new job guarding Boston’s most powerful vampire has her on edge—especially when she realizes something strange is going on with her employer, something even deadlier than usual…

Cavale isn’t thrilled that his sister works for vampires, but he’s determined to repair their relationship, and that means trusting her choices—until Elly’s job lands all of the Night Owls in deep trouble with a vengeful necromancer. And even their collective paranormal skills might not be enough to keep them from becoming part of the necromancer’s undead army…

***

YOU GUYS LOOK AWFULLY FAMILIAR

When I originally wrote Night Owls, I wasn’t sure there’d be a sequel. I left the story open-ended enough for there to be one, or for it to stand on its own. So when Ace wanted a sequel, I had to revisit a cast of characters who’d been out of my head and off my desk for just about a year.

It was a wee bit terrifying – what if I’d forgotten their voices? What if I’d didn’t have a good story to tell? There came the Impostor Syndrome, right on cue: Everyone’s going to know you’re a terrible writer. A one-trick pony.

That awful little imp never truly goes away, but I learned that – at least when it came to finding the characters – it was wrong. I thought a bit about where everyone would be a month after Night Owls finished. How would they be processing (or avoiding processing) the events of the first book? The walk between the train station and my office turned out to be the perfect length for me to noodle on how different people would interact with one another. I paired ’em up and watched ’em go, and it was a bit like meeting up with a bunch of good friends you haven’t seen in a while – after the it’s-been-too-longs, it was like we’d never been apart.

Soon enough, Chaz was dropping f-bombs everywhere, Elly was ready to climb the walls, and I even had a plot.

OUTLINES ARE NOT POISON

Oh my god, you guys, I’m such a pantser.

Okay, not entirely true – I will plot a few chapters ahead, and when I’ve written up to that point, I look where the story’s going and plot a little more. If a scene comes to me out of order, I jot down notes. Even without a solid outline, I generally have an endgame in mind. But the squishy middle? I let it stay squishy.

When I was a wee writer, back in the days where I talked more about writing than actually, y’know, writing, I liked to trot out a quote from Stephen King about how outlines were for bad writers. Sweet zombie Jesus, that was pretentious of me. I can look back on those days and count the projects I actually, y’know, finished on no hands. I was lucky if anything got beyond the first 10,000 words.

So when my editor, the lovely Rebecca Brewer, asked for an outline of what would become Grave Matters, I spent a couple of weeks wibbling. Not because I still adhered to that King quote, but because it’s more planning than I usually do. But hey, your editor asks you for an outline, you give her one. She’s a professional. She knows shit’s going to change. It’s okay.

I put my butt in the chair and got it done. Sometimes my brain made sad whirring, clunking noises when I got stuck on a plot point, but part of the writing process, even for a pantser like me, is figuring out what comes next. I called on my RPG-writing and GMing skills, here. I imagined the characters as PCs, tried to figure out what I would do if I were playing them in someone else’s game. What questions would I ask the GM? How would I apply the knowledge I had gathered? On the flip side, if I were running a game for these characters, what wrenches could I fling into their works? It got me past those sticking points, and I was able to move ’em along toward the endgame.

Neat things I learned: Writing an outline did not sap my soul. Nor did it kill the fun of writing the story. In fact, it helped me figure out the next two things…

THAT SUBPLOT’S GOTTA GO

In its original form, GRAVE MATTERS had an extra subplot. It wasn’t a terrible subplot. It followed on from things that happened in the first book, and it helped set up more terrible things for me to do the characters down the road. Writers are mean, you guys.

But it was also way too convoluted. George RR Martin I am most decidedly NOT, and in the 90-100,000 word scope of an urban fantasy novel, there simply wasn’t enough wordspace to pull it off – or, at least, not pull it off well.

So I made with the cutting.

I was a bit scared, since it meant mostly cutting the Jackals from the first book out of the second. Part of me insisted they had to be there, doing evil, Jackally things. Yet, when I pulled their threads out of the synopsis, the rest of the plot didn’t unravel. What emerged, in fact, was a better story, one that made more sense. Bonus – my editor didn’t set the revised outline on fire and send it back to me.

MORE VOICES!

It wasn’t all about excision, though. Another thing I learned while outlining was, I had to put something in. Someone, actually. Book one had three point-of-view characters: Val, Elly, and Chaz. That was plenty, thought I. (see “not-GRRM,” above). Those three, I knew, were absolutely coming back for Grave Matters. I had their shenanigans all planned out.

But looking back at my beats of what-needs-to-happen, I realized I had events jotted down that no one in that trinity would be present for. I could, I supposed, have the character who did witness them explain it all after the fact (which put me in danger of Too Much Exposition). OR. Or! I could do that thing I hear writers ought to do and show the audience.

Just a scene, I thought. Just to try it out, see if it works. I had this warlock, you see, Elly’s brother, who’s been through a whole lot of bullshit and hardship in his life. He’d finally started building a life for himself, when suddenly his estranged sister shows up on his doorstep at the start of Night Owls. How’s that working out for him? For both of them?

Turns out, boy did I like writing from Cavale’s POV. You get a little more worldbuilding, access to another facet of Elly’s background, and, as one of my beta readers pointed out, MORE FEELS.

FUCK YEAH BOOKSELLERS

Okay, I’m cheating on this one a bit. I mean, it’s something I already knew, and I’m utterly and completely biased about the subject anyway, but the last year of my authorly life has only reinforced my love for booksellers. I have a folder in my email labeled “Awesome,” and it’s filled with congratulations from the people who work their butts off day in and day out to get books – sometimes my book! – in readers’ hands. Bookstores, and the booksellers who staff them, are essential, important parts of our community. Any new city I visit, you can be damned sure I’m visiting one of its indie stores. Which always makes checking baggage on the flight home a game of how close to the weight limit can I get without going over but… worth it. It’s been a little surreal to stop in at a bookstore I don’t have a personal connection to and see Night Owls on the shelf, or have a friend tweet a picture to me of seeing it out in the wild.

Plus, booksellers get all the bookstore jokes I’ve sprinkled through the series.

(And hey, if you have a favorite local bookstore, maybe give ’em a shoutout in the comments?)

Lauren M. Roy: Website | Twitter | Tumblr

Grave Matters: Indiebound | B&N | Amazon

The gaslight and shadows of the underground city of Recoletta hide secrets and lies. When Inspector Liesl Malone investigates the murder of a renowned historian, she finds herself stonewalled by the all-powerful Directorate of Preservation – Recoletta’s top-secret historical research facility.

When a second high-profile murder threatens the very fabric of city society, Malone and her rookie partner Rafe Sundar must tread carefully, lest they fall victim to not only the criminals they seek, but the government which purports to protect them. Knowledge is power, and power must be preserved at all costs…

***

JUST GO WITH IT

Writing your first book is a dare to yourself.

It starts with the embryo of a story and the nagging suspicion that, just maybe, you could grow it into a real book. So you carve out quiet little moments after work or school, pecking away at the keyboard and thinking, “Ha ha, look at this, I’m putting one word after the other, just like a real author.”

You don’t tell anyone about your little hobby—not yet. It feels too soon. Like introducing the parents on the first date. But late evenings and early mornings speed by in front of the computer, and you catch your wandering mind turning more and more to the next scene, the next plot twist, or the next juicy bit of worldbuilding.

You’re not entirely sure you’ve got the stamina to make it to the end. But somehow, seven thousand words become twenty thousand words, and before you know it, you’re sitting on fifty thousand words, and you’re too invested to quit.

Nothing demystifies the writing process so much as attempting it yourself. There’s no professional certification for it, no real prerequisite. By the time you’re waist-deep in it, what keeps you going is the sheer curiosity to see what happens next (both in and for your manuscript) and the challenge you continually issue yourself to get through one more chapter.

…BUT IT’S OKAY TO TAKE A STEP BACK

The first draft of THE BURIED LIFE took about a year to write. That’s not terribly unusual, especially for a first effort.

But I finished that draft over eight and a half years ago. All that time between then and now? Most of that’s been revising, editing, querying, and catching my skills up with my ambitions.

Writing a book is hard. But cleaning up the lump of coal that emerges from your fingertips at one in the morning and polishing it into something shiny and wonderful?

That’s harder.

You write this first draft, and typing “THE END” feels like reaching the summit of Everest, even though your manuscript only clocks in at 60,000 words, which is about 20,000 too short for the genre you’re writing.

And that’s only the first of your problems.

Then, you look back at paragraphs of lovingly crafted description and see them weighed down with adverbs and redundancy. You read through your first halting efforts at dialogue, and you shudder.

You close your laptop with the jarring realization that this misbegotten child of a manuscript is not the book you sat down to write.

Worse, you don’t know how to fix it. You don’t know how to make your worldbuilding feel compelling and interesting, and you don’t know how to make your dialogue believable, let alone entertaining.

So you set it aside, you keep reading the authors you love, and you find a regular critique group. You start to notice how other writers solve the very problems you’re having. After a suitable moratorium, you go back to your neglected manuscript and realize that you know how to solve many of those problems, too.

So you solve them.

But you recognize other issues—bad habits you’d never noticed before, tendencies you’d never seen as problematic.

You make a note of these issues, take another hiatus, and get back to the business of reading and critiquing. You’ll come back when you’re ready.

KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE AND YOUR BETA READERS CLOSER

Most writers will, at some point, show their works in progress to trusted peers and mentors for feedback.

This is important for many reasons, only one of which is the actual feedback.

Beta readers help you develop your calluses for the long road ahead. They’ll get you used to hearing frank assessments of your work. They’ll help you adjust to having your flaws noted and remarked upon by others.

These tough love lessons will be invaluable when you start querying total strangers in hopes of interesting them in your writing. Even more so when you start to get reviews.

But even that isn’t the most useful function of beta readers. Beta readers help writers most of all simply by reading.

Writing can be a lonely endeavor. You spend months crafting your story, only to wonder: is anyone’s ever going to read it?

A beta reader is an answer to that question. He or she is a promise that you’re not doing the work alone. Someone’s waiting on the other side of that Dropbox folder, so you’d better switch off the television and finish your chapter.

The motivation that comes from having a reader—even one you’re bribing with pizza and beer—is not to be discounted. It presents a goal, and it fans that hope that, one day, you’ll find an even wider audience.

Meanwhile, it’s still great to have someone there to help you catch your mistakes and find your blind spots.

But don’t give your beta readers all the hard work. There’s plenty you can do on your own.

SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS (OR JUST READ IT ALOUD)

Most of the problems in a manuscript—repeated words, unnatural dialogue, clunky phrasing, pages where nothing of interest happens—become apparent when the work is read aloud. Your ear catches the hiccups and doldrums that your forgiving eye skates past. And your ear is a better proxy for the first-time reader’s experience.

Those spots where you trip over your own wording? Revise ‘em.

The places where you bore yourself? Cut ‘em, or find a way to build in tension and action.

Reading 80,000-100,000 words aloud is time-consuming. But it’s a lot faster than the dozen-or-so silent reads that you’d need to catch the same problems. So think of that read-aloud as an investment, and promise yourself Scotch at the end.

Averse to the sound of your own voice? Even better. Just pretend it’s Idris Elba reading your work. Would he use “enthused” as a dialogue tag? No, he would not.

PUT IN FACE TIME

There comes a point when you’ve prettied up your manuscript as best you can, gotten feedback from your beta readers, and sent out some queries. Maybe you’ve even gotten some nibbles, but none of them have amounted to anything more than chapter requests.

It may be time to up your game.

There’s a whole bevy of conferences, conventions, and workshops you can attend virtually year-round. Some are places for writers to meet with editors and agents, some are venues for authors to hone their skills, and some are gatherings for fans and creators to celebrate and discuss the genres they love.

Some of these will cost more money than you’re willing to spend, and others will require time off that you don’t have. But chances are good that there’s something in your area that’s feasible for a weekend jaunt.

Case in point, I met my future editor at Worldcon in San Antonio and pitched THE BURIED LIFE to him there. A couple months later, I had a contract for a two-book deal.

Take my sample size of one and do with it what you will, but when I visited with the Angry Robot staff that weekend, they indicated that, while they usually require agented submissions, they sometimes make exceptions for authors they meet in person. I’ve heard similar sentiments from other industry professionals, too.

Now, it’s still entirely possible (and, for many people, preferable) to go through the entire process of selling a book without ever having a face-to-face meeting. But there’s always something to be said for the personal connection. It may not sell your book, but it will help you stand out above the thousands of faceless authors who are nothing more than names in an inbox. Hopefully in the best possible way.

***

Carrie Patel is an author, narrative designer, and expatriate Texan. When she isn’t working on her own fiction, she works as a narrative designer for Obsidian Entertainment and writes for their upcoming CRPG, Pillars of Eternity. Her work has also appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Carrie Patel: Website | Twitter

The Buried Life: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound | Goodreads | Robot Trading Company

Computer genius Jeremy Stillwater has designed a machine that can predict global conflicts and ultimately head them off. But he’s a stubborn guy, very sure of his own genius, and has wound up making enemies, and even seen his brilliant invention discredited.

There’s nowhere for him to turn when the most remarkable thing happens: his computer beeps with warning that the outbreak of World War III is imminent, three days and counting.

Alone, armed with nothing but his own ingenuity, he embarks on quest to find the mysterious and powerful nemesis determined to destroy mankind. But enemies lurk in the shadows waiting to strike. Could they have figured out how to use Jeremy, and his invention, for their own evil ends?

Before he can save billions of lives, Jeremy has to figure out how to save his own. . . .

ONE: The things that ultimately can save us are the same ones that got us in this mess to begin with.

At the heart of The Doomsday Equation are a man and the computer program he created. The man is named Jeremy Stillwater. The program he created can predict war, the onset of armed conflict, and its duration. Trouble is, Jeremy is the worst person ever to predict and prevent conflict; that’s because he’s a conflict addict. He’s hostile, self-righteous, a first-class jerk. He’s alienated all the people who once believed in his genius, including his girlfriend, investors, military liaisons who once thought his program could help predict the next big terrorist attack. And, so there’s nowhere left for Jeremy to turns when his computer tells him the dire news: global nuclear war, three days and counting. In the end, Jeremy must confront his own demons – his penchant for hostility and interpersonal conflict – if he is to save the world. In this way, the books forced me to ask (and learn the answer to) a question: do our modern tools help make the world safer by protecting us from ourselves or do they make the world danger by becoming powerful extenders of our darkest leanings?

Two: Writing naughty bits is scary.

One of the antagonists in The Doomsday Equation, a near-term sci-fi thriller, is named Janine. She’s smart, well-read, philosophical, spiritual, murderous and, sometimes, horny. Sometimes, between feats of violence, she likes to relax with a little carnal action. So I decided to show one such act. My fingers blushed as I typed. I’ve written many, many hundreds of thousands of words (and five books), but never this kind of scene. I thought: will my mom read this and know I’ve done it (I figure she knows; I am in my 40s and have two children so, y’know…something happened somewhere along the line). I didn’t precisely go for it when I wrote the sex scene but I didn’t pull my punches either. I made it clear who was doing what to whom. No, I won’t tell you what page. You’ll have to read it and let me know if, at least that part of the book, strikes a proverbial nerve.

Three: What can computers already predict?

I always try to base my books in some semblance of reality. After all, what is scarier than that? So I spent time looking at how computers make predictions. They’re doing it all the time, more so by the day. So named: Predictive Analytics. It’s not so complex a concept actually, though it is a bit of an overstated one. The simple part is this: the computers look for patterns that precede an event – say a weather event or change in stock market – and then predict future events as similar or related patterns emerge. Simple, right. But a bit overstated. It’s not the same as predicting the future. It’s not the same as saying: this is what will happen. Rather, it’s the same as saying: this is what has happened when such-and-such events have occurred before. A small but powerful distinction. At the same time, predictive analytics appear all over the place, helping businesses predict demand, meteorologists weather, doctors disease patterns.  The Centers for Disease Control, the world’s premier medical institution, uses our Internet habits — what we search for, what we say online — to predict the intensity and timing of a flu epidemic. Who and where are people searching for medicines, vaccines? Google calls it Google Flu.

Four: Computers can actually predict – yep, you guessed it – war. Sort of.

A real paper in the journal Nature says: yes. The paper called it “the mathematics of war.” It looked at 54,000 attacks from 11 wars and, by doing so, established patterns. What kinds of groups attack (how big, what is the nature of their relationship? What sort of social ecosystem presages attack? How many will be killed? What kind of military or strategic response can forestall such an attack). The journal proposed an equation. They called it “The Power Law.”

The real-world person behind this equation is named Sean Gourley. He’s a Silicon Valley wunderkind. His ideas helped spark The Doomsday Equation.  He’s much nicer than the protagonist in the book, far more gracious, no less genius.

Five: It never hurts to ask.

Over the years (and books), I’ve gotten lots of terrific blurbs from world-class writers. On this one, I thought I’d try to get a copy to Lee Child, a guy I’ve chatted with from time to time but never reached out to for a blurb. Through an intermediary, I asked. Our mutual friend said: he’s too busy. But you could always ask him yourself. I did. Boy, am I glad. He wrote of the Doomsday Equation: “It’s a mile-a-minute, lone guy against the world masterpiece.” Thank you, Lee. This exquisite blurb I could never have predicted.

 * * *

Matt Richtel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning technology reporter for the New York Times. He is the author of A Deadly Wandering and the novels The Cloud and Devil’s Plaything.

Matt Richtel: Website | Twitter | Facebook

The Doomsday Equation: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound | Goodreads

Some of you may have noted that the March 3rd release of The Hellsblood Bride has come and gone. I noted earlier that the book was canceled, though not every site carried that update — I think Goodreads was still insisting it was coming out, despite reality’s insistence otherwise. Which suggests we should be keeping an eye on Goodreads, because it may have gained sentience. I’m just saying. Weaponized book reviews? THAT SHIT IS COMING. Just you watch.

Anyway.

So, Mookie Pearl is dead.

But long live Mookie Pearl.

Because, as it turns out, I am once again in possession of those rights.

Which means, Mookie Pearl is getting a resurrection.

Lightning and fire and a smudge of the ol’ Blue Blazes around the temples. That’s right, I’m talking Cerulean, Peacock Powder, Smurf Jizz, the ol’ blue, ol’ boy.

No firm release date on this, as yet. I’ll likely give it a late-in-the-year release so as not to clog up my release schedule (there’s a lot coming out: The Harvest, Zer0es, plus the re-release of the Miriam Black books across e-book first and then print, and oh yeah, that Miriam Black novella, and hey let’s not forget that REDACTED book I can’t even talk about, yet). I think given the tenor of the book, it makes sense to aim for Halloween — so, expect a release in the weeks leading up to everyone’s favorite spookypants holiday.

Plus, that’ll give me time to spit-and-polish the sequel to my heart’s delight.

(This means I’ll be releasing both Blue Blazes and Hellsblood Bride on one day.)

You can, of course, read the opening chapter from The Blue Blazes to get a taste.

And then you have to wait.

But soon! By the end of the year. Soon.

P.S. Zer0es cover reveal tomorrow, I think, at B&N book blog.