So, the monthly bestseller list for Middle Grade Paperbacks landed aaaaand, to my genuine shock, Dust & Grim is a New York Times Bestseller? It hit #10 on that list and — I mean, wow, whoa, what? What?? Obviously a lot of you bought the book and that’s amazing, and now here we are? I’m floored. Thank you, all, and thanks to B&N for making this book the October Monthly Pick. Thanks to my agent, Stacia Decker, and also to to my editor, Deirdre Jones, who helped make this book as weird and scary and funny as it could be. FLORG BLESS.
In other news:
Tomorrow, 3pm, I’ll be at Doylestown Bookshop at a pre-launch for the Wanderers sequel, Wayward. If you’re in the tristate area, I sure hope you come by. Event deets here. I signed a bunch there, too, for shipping pre-orders — you can see the epic stacks over at my Instagram.
And next week I will be on a tour through parts of the south! Going from Atlanta to Asheville to Charlotte to Richmond to Alexandria, then home before hitting up a few more Pennsylvania dates. All the details are here.
You will find me here at the Boston Globe talking about BOOKS I DONE LIKED and about how reading horror fiction brings me comfort.
Some places included Wayward in their NOVEMBER BOOKS coverage: Yahoo, Book Riot, tor.com.
Gonna be on some cool podcasts coming up — Dead Headspace, Terrifying Tomes, and some others. More when I have the links.
Twitter appears to now be violently diarrheaing the bed, so you can find me at the Instagram link above, or at Mastodon, which is still a thing. Maybe I’ll go back to Tumblr or start an OnlyFans page. One never knows.
Meanwhile, here are some nice things people have said about Wayward recently:
Princess Altagracia has lost everything. After a bloody civil war, her twin sister has claimed both the crown of their planet, Szayet, and the Pearl of its prophecy: a computer that contains the immortal soul of Szayet’s god.
So when the interstellar Empire of Ceiao turns its conquering eye toward Szayet, Gracia sees an opportunity. To regain her planet, Gracia places herself in the hands of the empire and its dangerous commander, Matheus Ceirran.
But winning over Matheus, to say nothing of his mercurial and compelling captain Anita, is no easy feat. And in trying to secure her planet’s sovereignty and future, Gracia will find herself torn between Matheus’s ambitions, Anita’s unpredictable desires, and the demands of the Pearl that whispers in her ear.
For Szayet’s sake and her own, she will need to become more than a princess with a silver tongue. She will have to become a queen as history has never seen before.
A storyteller’s job is the photo-negative of a biographer’s.
A biographer begins by establishing the bare facts of a life: birth and marriage, work and death. From there, she helps the reader work inward: putting the subject’s actions into context, helping the reader understand what they indicate about her and her world.
A storyteller, on the other hand, begins with the inside and works out. When I decided to restage the lives of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar as a space opera, the first thing I had to do was learn who my Cleopatra and Caesar, Gracia and Ceirran, were: how they thought, what they feared, what they hoped for, what their voices sounded like. Only from there could I begin to reveal to the reader, bit by bit, what people like this might do.
Through the what-ifs of speculative fiction, history can reveal itself…
For hundreds of years before she was born, Cleopatra’s family were priests of the cult of Alexander the Great. They considered themselves his heirs, and his memory legitimized their rule. In a sense, all of the Egyptian kings and queens of that time carried Alexander’s ghost.
Who could resist making that ghost literal? Gracia inherits an AI that claims to be Alexander the Great’s digitized soul. This meant I could write dialogue for Alexander himself—such a delight to do that it still feels like it must be cheating somehow—but it also allowed me to bring abstract ideas into the realm of the physical: legacy, royalty, succession and monarchy, cults, civilization and barbarism.
Sci-fi lets a storyteller enlarge everything. A conqueror doesn’t just burn down a village; he blows up the moon. A would-be king doesn’t just want to establish a dynasty; he wants to live forever. At the galactic scale, details become sharper, clearer—at their very best, more real than reality.
…but what-ifs don’t stop at the scientific.
There was no question of populating my imaginary galaxy with modern American views of gender and sex. For one thing, those ideas wouldn’t exist in their current form without Roman law and custom around gender, so the whole exercise would be circular. For another, Roman sex beliefs weren’t just antiquated—they were different. Making the majority of my female characters the legal property of my male characters would have been a tough pill to swallow. Having a male character explain that it’s not gay for him to have sex with a man if that man is an actor would throw the reader into a very foreign world.
I wanted to create a foreign world, but—selfishly—I wanted it to be my world, with characters’ assumptions and dreams constrained by my rules, not by Cato’s. That meant entirely abandoning the enforcement of gender roles, legally or socially. I had to put characters of all genders in every part of my story, dressing in all sorts of ways, having relationships and children in all sorts of configurations.
Now I had room for all sorts of tense gender dynamics that the reader could bring their own interpretations to—for instance, Caesar could still be a powerful, privileged older man, which the reader would certainly bring their own modern-world assumptions to! But I also had room for imagination: what if swaggering, sly, rough-and-ready Mark Antony were a woman? What if dour, proper Calpurnia, seen in history only as Caesar’s long-suffering wife, were a man? What if the real-life queer love affairs of Alexander, Caesar, and Antony were conducted openly?
History doesn’t have a beginning…
What is the beginning of the history of me? Was it when I was born? Was it the moment my parents first spoke to one another? Was it the moment my grandfather decided to move to California? Was it the moment my great-grandmother’s nephews were murdered, and her family was given their spare tickets on the ship to America? Was it the moment the tsar sent his soldiers to the town where they would commit those murders? Was it the moment my father first read me a story?
Ask the person on the street to describe Cleopatra, and they might give you an image of a queen in a snake crown, or a girl rolling out of a carpet. But Cleopatra’s history doesn’t begin in the carpet, any more than Julius Caesar’s life began when she landed on his floor. So where does it begin? With the civil war that forced her to sneak into Caesar’s rooms through subterfuge? With the death of her father, which caused that war? Does it begin with the decision of her ancestor Ptolemy to found a kingdom in Egypt after the death of his general, Alexander the Great? Does it start with the first time Alexander dreamed of conquering the world?
…but stories do.
So choosing to begin a retelling of Cleopatra’s life with any event at all felt like an oversimplification—shrinking a brilliant, complex woman to a single narrative.
But in fact, no one knew those limits better than Cleopatra herself. From the carpet to the barge to her coins to her statues, she understood the spectacle of her life: the theater of herself, its boundaries and its potential. She understood the importance of telling her own story—and she understood the difference between a story and the truth. Doing justice to her wouldn’t mean never telling a story at all. It would mean holding space for that difference, the way she would have. And this gap ended up being the central engine of The Stars Undying, and of its unreliable narrator.
Human beings are infinite. Choosing a beginning for them is reductive. But the job of a story is to reduce—and by reducing, to expand: to use something simple to reveal something complex. It is to use something as small as a map to reveal something as big as the territory. It is to use something as small as a galaxy to reveal something as big as a soul.
***
Emery Robin is a paralegal, recovering Californian, and sometime student of propaganda and art history living in New York City.
Sometimes I ask myself if humans are good or bad or somewhere in the middle. I wonder if we are worthy of the world, if civilization was worth its cost. Then I remember that humans invented the leafblower, and I decide I can’t wait till the octopuses and crows take over.
Right now, as I type this, a neighbor — not even a next-door neighbor, but one several houses removed — has a landscaping service featuring a trio of young white jabronis with leafblowers. These are gas-powered leafblowers. The property is, I’d guess, around a half-acre in size.
They have been there for an hour and a half. Leafblowing this entire time.
It is incredibly loud.
It sounds like this:
vvvvWWAAAHHHHHHHH
mmmMWMAAAAAAWAAAAHHHHH
NNNNAAAAHHHHHHHHHH
VVMMMAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH
brum brum brum brum
HYYYAYAAAAAAAHHHHHHHNNNNHHHHNNN
It is the sound of machines screaming. Angry hot hell-machines screaming their torment into the world. And, for an extra bonus, I’ve watched these fucking dickheads doing their leafblowing, and it is, as anyone who has ever used a leafblower knows, wildly fucking inefficient. It’s like herding butterflies. It’s just trying to move a swarm of bees with a box fan. You watch these shitheads wave their black tubes around, blasting clouds of leaves and dust into the air — leaves that will not be so casually commanded, oh no. Leaves that the wind gladly puts right back from whence they came. They’re not moving leaves in a straight line. It’s chaos theory. It’s water on back of Ian Malcolm’s hand. It’s limbs akimbo, a nightmare dance of nothing done.
I watched a guy (different lawn) two weeks ago herding about a half-dozen small leaves back and forth, back and forth, with his leafblower. He’d blast them one way, but then they’d escape his intended path, so he’d go the other way, and end up back where they came from. He would’ve been more efficient had he blindfolded himself and used a pair of fucking chopsticks to do the job.
Listen.
It’s a come to Jesus moment.
Fuck your gas-powered leafblower.
Get rid of it.
Your gas-powered leafblower is a fucking nightmare. It’s a nightmare first and foremost for the environment. Just on a basic exhaust level, the pollutants a two-stroke engine leafblower emit into the world are hundreds of times worse than a goddamn automobile. (Source: Sierra Club.) I need you to reckon with that because it’s worse than even I, a person who Deeply Detests Leafblowers, expected. From Edmunds: “A consumer-grade leaf blower emits more pollutants than a 6,200-pound 2011 Ford F-150 SVT Raptor.” Also from that article: “The hydrocarbon emissions from a half-hour of yard work with the two-stroke leaf blower are about the same as a 3,900-mile drive from Texas to Alaska in a Raptor,” said Jason Kavanagh, Engineering Editor at Edmunds.com. “As ridiculous as it may sound, it is more ‘green’ to ditch your yard equipment and find a way to blow leaves using a Raptor.”
Holy fucking shit. That’s awful. It’s like the leafblower was a device designed by an actual demon in order to help destroy the world.
Plus, the noise pollution is bad for people and for nature. For extra fun, the leafblowers just kick up everything you really don’t want kicked up. Dust? Yup! Mold and spores? Absolutely! Pesticides you don’t wanna breath in? Sure! Aerosolized raccoon shit? Hell yeah, bro! Time to take a big ol’ lungful of POSSUM DUNG. Mmmm. Get that all up in you.
And here’s the thing: leaves? They’re supposed to be there. They fall from trees for a reason. It’s not fucking random! They’re not mad at us and puking leaves onto our lawns because they hate us (though trees should definitely 100% hate us). Nature is a circuit! A glorious, sometimes-simple, sometimes-elaborate circuit. Trees soak up all these nutrients, some of those go into the leaves, the leaves fall to the ground, and ta-da, they redistribute those nutrients into the ground. The health of the ground is based on this very cycle. It is an essential loop. You further will discover that there are other natural necessities that come with leaf cover and leaf litter, as well. Little wonderful creatures like to chill out over the winter under leaf litter. You know how we’re killing all the insects in an insect apocalypse? Yeah. This is part of that. You ever lament the loss of fireflies (around here, we call ’em lightning bugs)? You say, “Gosh, I don’t see as many of those little glowing butts these days.” Well, this is part of why you don’t. They love those leaves. They need those leaves. (Also, they don’t need the pesticide. Relax with the fucking pesticide.) And then the birds are happy too because sometimes they like to eat those bugs.
And here someone says, “But the leaf cover kills my lawn!”
Riiiight, yeah, here’s the thing, your lawn is also bad. It is a weak, whimpering monoculture. It is a sad, non-native, largely-lifeless inert carbon-useless golf-green that has somehow become The Way Our Lawns Must Look. The reason leaf cover kills it is because your lawn is shit. It’s thin piss. It is landscaping gruel. You ever walk through a forest, an actual forest, and lament how the leaves have killed the grass there? No? You know why? BECAUSE THAT’S HOW IT’S SUPPOSED TO LOOK. That’s just nature! It’s supposed to be that way! The leaves fall! It’s fine! It’s good, even! Even if you really really want that lawn, did you know there are native grasses you can use? And you don’t even need to use grasses? Our lawn is a diverse nonsense array of dozens and dozens of different plants that we don’t fertilize and we don’t spray with pesticide or herbicide and even on drought days it’s green and healthy-looking and yes, some of it is invasive, and I combat the invasive stuff with aggressive native spreaders, and turns out, those native spreaders have flowers and they bring bugs and pollinators and birds who want the bugs and who want the seeds and it’s really pretty and I love it and I don’t ever have to strap a soot-belching silence-murdering jet engine to my back to protect it from the big mean leaves that fall from the big mean trees. What a wonder!
(Oh, and we get so many fireflies it is legit like a religious experience.)
And yes, I acknowledge here that sometimes you have to move some leaves around. You want to clear walkways. You want to clear some ditches and drains. You may even want some yard space where kids can run without slipping on wet leaves. I acknowledge this.
But have you ever considered… using a rake? Hell, okay, even if you really love the (in)efficiency of a leafblower, they make electric ones! They’re really good now! And super quiet! And not barfing shit into the air! It’s amazing!
Anyway.
To sum up:
You’re literally killing the world to crappily usher leaves around, leaves that should be largely left alone because they’re supposed to be there.
Stop trying to control nature. You’re a part of it, not above it, not separate from it, you are not its master. We have to start learning to live in synchronicity with the world, because right now? We are the invasive species.
Your gas-powered leafblower is shitty and bad and should be banned.
The end.
P.S., the leafblowers finally stopped. It took them almost two hours. Christ.
Effects Vary features 22 stories of dark fiction and literary horror that explore the shadow side of love, loss, and family. From an aging TV star’s murderous plan to rekindle her glory days, to a father who returns from war forever changed, from human lab rats who die again and again, to a farmer who obeys the dreadful commands of the sky, these stories, four of them award winners, blur the thin line between reality and the darkest reaches of the imagination.This collection contains a decade’s worth of stories, 22 in all. Paring 22 different writing journeys down to five lessons-learned is a challenge, and a lesson itself. Each story posed its own creative puzzle and obstacle course.
***
Each writing voyage had its own taste of heaven and hell.
Maybe that’s best the place to start? Heaven and hell. Why not? Hell first, then we ascend.
1. Writing Is Hell
While writing many of these stories I experienced the same amnesiac moment, either when I jotted the first words or stumbled through a later draft: “How did I do this last time? And the time before that?” Or the more pressing question, “How will I do it again?”
I sometimes feel writers exist in some cosmic game of Chutes and Ladders. No matter how high we climb the board we must always start from scratch, and story progress is almost never linear.
Sometimes a story starts like a downhill slalom on virgin snow, pulled by the gravity of the imagination. Other times it’s a tortuous mountain ascent, through prickly trees that obscure the view, over shaky ground that crumbles underfoot.
What I’ve learned writing this collection—and continue to learn—is that each story teaches you how to write it. Eventually. Often, it’s a matter of trusting and following the character’s voice. Sometimes it’s a simple matter of erasure. On revisions, I often realize the first two pages are merely throat clearing; punch delete and with the verbal phlegm cleared, things, miraculously, fall into place. As if the story were a sculpture, and once the excess material is chiseled away, a better, truer, form reveals itself.
On occasion, the end comes first. You throw it like a stone in the distance, then the writer ambles toward it, on a trail you make as you go.
Word by word, draft by draft, ass in chair, the writer climbs the ladder out of hell, till the story is done. Until the next story starts, you slide back to the beginning, and amnesia strikes again.
2. Writing Is Heaven
Occasionally, though, you get a gift from above. A story springs straight out of your head, Athena-like, fully born, and ready to amble into the world. No 18 drafts to reach a publishable stage. Rather, the dictation comes from above or below and you just surrender and follow. “We Is We” was one of those rare stories. I wrote it in two sittings and the published version is barely altered from the first draft.
I suppose this isn’t so much a lesson learned as an appeal to the forces. Send me more of that mojo. Teach me the order of sigils and sacrifices. I’ll sharpen my knives and prepare the altar. I’ll watch the clouds, augur the birds, and await your reply.
3. The Power of Reefer Madness
I have a friend, a talented writer, who decided Bombay Sapphire was the ultimate lubricant for his creative machinery. Yes, it’s an old myth that never seems to die, a kind of broken syllogism fashioned from a causal fallacy: So many great writers were heavy drinkers, therefore heavy drinking makes you a great writer. My friend, sadly, failed to become a great writer. He did, however, succeed in becoming an alcoholic—though he’s ten years sober now, bless him.
I love whiskey, wine, and gin, but I don’t find drinking and writing to be an especially fruitful combination—alcohol can make me sleepy or fuzzed, the opposite of what a writer needs. I’ve always been more of a pot smoker and I’ve learned, for me, writing and editing with marijuana can be hugely beneficial.
I don’t think there’s a story in this collection I didn’t work on, at least once, stoned. Of course, I edited all of them sober as a flagpole, too. But writing stoned offers invaluable, temporary powers—if you’re seasoned enough to read and write while high.
For one, pot offers new perspective. It alters the angle on the work. It allows the mind to spread a bit wider when faced with a story dead end or a line that refuses to hammer into shape. It also makes the scary, scarier. Reading high, I’ve felt my heart stutter when working through many of these stories, spellbound—largely thanks to Maryjane—by my own creations.
It’s not an infallible method. But what creative method is? For me, I’ve learned writing high can take off the guardrails. It can free the imagination and silence the censor (or turns it up to 11, as needed). It can also make you vulnerable and open in the best of ways. Rimbaud said it better than anyone: “The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses.” I love the decadent writers and their lineage. They, along with many other writers, exist in the cornerstone of this collection.
If I lived in the States maybe I’d market my own pot strain. I’d call it The Green Muse and I’d be rich enough to retire.
4. Creative Theft or How I Learned to Ignore the Anxiety of Influence and Steal Better
Speaking of cornerstones, as the recently deceased genius Jean-Luc Godard said, “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.” I think this collection taught me to be a better thief, and I’m hard-pressed to think of someone I’ve stolen more from than Brian Evenson.
I had the good fortune of meeting Evenson at Brown, my last year in the MFA program there. He was applying for a teaching job and I was a student rep. on the search committee that eventually hired him. Unfortunately, as I graduated that year, I didn’t get a chance to study with him, not until he taught a seminar on horror fiction in Romania.
In Romania, Brian lived up to his reputation. Not only is he one of the greatest living writers of dark fiction, he’s also a superb teacher—not to mention one of the nicest, most generous, humans I’ve ever met. He gave us three writing prompts and two of those turned into stories in this collection. The titular story, Effects Vary, was based on a prompt he gave about meeting your own doppelgänger. The story, like many others, expanded from a flash piece to a full-blown tale of cosmic weirdness. It was only after I finished that I realized I’d been channeling Brian throughout the piece, long after Romania. Rather than rework the piece to cut the Evenson-esque bits, I embraced his influence on the final edits. Á la Evenson, I stripped the language barer, and veered the end toward more uncertainty. Sometimes leaning into your influences works wonders.
That’s what I learned. Steal smarter and deeper, for the work will always be your own in the end. So, for Effects Vary, additional nods to Laird Barron, Cormac McCarthy, George Saunders, Samantha Hunt, Flannery O’Conner and so many others. These authors knit their work into my flesh, and thus they bleed into the stories here.
An interesting addendum: when Brian generously agreed to blurb this book, he said that particular story was his favorite in the collection. Perhaps we most love the children of others who resemble our own.
5. Embrace Your Terrified Inner Child
As a kid, I was a scaredy-cat with an overactive imagination. I saw monsters in closets and dark corners. I couldn’t finish the local carnival’s haunted house, though its effects were cheap and poorly done. I had to exit, shamefaced, back through the entrance right after the first gimmick—a lit-up wolfman accompanied by a piercing buzzer.
Once, on the only sleepover night of my day camp, a counselor told a scary story about a queen ant crawling in a camper’s ear and laying its eggs. “It happened right where you’re sleeping,” he said. “Sleeping on a tarp on the grass, just like you guys.” You can guess what happened to the camper. Yup, she scratched her face off when the eggs hatched. The story left me terrified and in tears. They had to call my mother to pick me up and drive me home.
It’s embarrassing to remember these incidents and the cowardly child I once was. Though I’m grateful for that scaredy-cat kid. My fantasy-prone imagination has served me well as a writer. And something shifted in my teen years, part of that weird and terrible morphing called puberty. I began to crave that rush of fear, to seek it out in films and books. It took more and more to scare me and still does. Few movies or books do it. I might get creeped out, grossed out, or filled with dread, but rarely am I terrified.
That’s what I learned to seek in many of these stories. That vulnerable, naked terror, where the earth beneath grows flimsy and the world stops making sense. I tried to reach my inner child and scare the crap out of him.
Among other reasons, I realized I write horror to make that kid in all of us want to sprint out of the haunted house or call her mommy to take her home. Only she can’t because she’s trapped by my story, compelled to turn the page.
Children feel terror differently. The earth wobbles when they’re afraid. And true terror makes children of us all. Thank you, scaredy-cat child, for teaching me the meaning and value of bowel-loosening, eye-widening fear. Now let me tell you another story…
***
Michael Harris Cohen has published stories in Conjunctions, The Dark Magazine, Pseudopod, Apparition Lit. and numerous anthologies. He’s a recipient of the New Century Writer’s Scholarship from Zoetrope: All-Story, a Fulbright grant for literary translation, and fellowships from the OMI International Arts Center for Writers, Atlantic Center for the Arts, The Djerassi Foundation, The Jentel Artist’s Residency, the Künstlerdorf Schöppingen Foundation, and Hawthornden Castle. He’s won F(r)iction‘s short story contest, judged by Mercedes M. Yardley, The Modern Grimmoire Literary Prize, as well as Mixer Publishing’s Sex, Violence and Satire prize, judged by Stephen Graham Jones. He lives in Sofia, Bulgaria with his wife and daughters and teaches creatives writing and literature at the American University in Bulgaria. You can find him online at Michaelharriscohen.net and @fictionknot.
The troll has taken over the bridge, which is to say, Elon Musk now owns Twitter. Is this bad? Probably. Is this good? I don’t know, maybe there will be a good side to it, though it’s hard at this point to see what, precisely, that would be. Some of it depends on your feelings about Musk, and about Twitter, and about the ownership of media (social and mass and niche media) in total.
The picture isn’t rosy wherever you look. Most of our avenues of information — again, The Media, writ large — are gripped tightly by the hands of right-wing capitalist assholes who view and treat media less like it’s a vehicle for truth and more like it’s a vehicle ultimately for money. Yes, also a vehicle to further agenda, but ultimately, that agenda is to cycle more money. It’s always money. Making it. Laundering it. Occasionally setting it on fire.
Twitter now in the hands of Elon Musk means the so-called “town square” is in the hands of an increasingly erratic, trolly billionaire who began life being revered as Real Life Tony Stark and has since countered that image at every turn, revealing himself to be a third-tier Batman villain, desperate for Bruce Wayne’s attention, shitposting his way to infamy and winnowing stock prices.
So, what to do about that? Does it matter? Does it not?
Y’know, I dunno. Like I said, it’s not as if social media has long been a bastion of Good Ownership. It’s never really been in the hands of safe stewards, though sometimes you could at least catch a whiff of Twitter pretending to care. At the same time, you could make a very real argument that the shit-pit we have been slowly sinking into since, ohh, around 2016 or so, has been in part because of Twitter. Hell, before that — remember Gamer-gate? Yeah, me too.
Massive misinformation and disinformation and harassment have long run rampant, though it also feels like maybe, maybe that foul tide had started to recede a little bit. Twitter at least occasionally used mechanisms to ban accounts working to undermine the health and safety of people and democracy — though, while also occasionally leaving them hanging around long past a laundry list of flagrant violations (Libs of Tik Tok, f’rex). The tide may have been going out, but it was still gurgling around our ankles.
Now, though? I’m guessing it’ll be high tide again soon. It seems like it’s already starting. Even without going to look for it, I’m seeing some folks celebrating their newfound, um, free bird, with a fusillade of slurs and harassment. Whether the site will really become largely unmoderated, a true Hell-realm, a veritible tweetchan or tweety farms, I’ve no idea. Maybe all that is just bluff and bluster from Musk, given that you can trust what he says less than half the time (and that’s, I suspect, being charitable). And there has been chatter (some apocryphal, some purely made-up) that he’s going to open the gates of Arkham and let all the baddies pour back onto the streets of Gotham, and when that happens, no amount of moderation will push back the blooming red tide.
What will I personally do?
Y’know, I’m not sure. Twitter was a place I loved for a long time, then liked, then hated, and now I’m kind of outside space and time on it, where my feelings about it are mostly nostalgia and not anything present. I’ve made genuine friends there. I have built some of my career there. I’ve found excellent books there, learned neat things, and gotten to, well, fuck around and have fun with fun people, and that’s not nothing. It really matters. I have good memories there. But the opposite is also true, and Twitter has given me some of my worst days. I’ve long said it started out as a water-cooler, then it became a stage where we were all performing, and then one day it was a fight club. And you had to fight.
I think Twitter made me a better communicator while also making me a much worse communicator. I think it made me a better person in a lot of directions, and worse in others. I think it made me tougher for a while, and more frangible over time: calluses forming over brittle crystal. I don’t think it was ever good to sell books. And I think for a lot of creators the juice stopped being worth the squeeze — it is now, if I’m being honest, more of a liability than a value-add.
But I think it was a good place to meet your people. The micro-communities there are great. The friend groups are great. It’s harder and harder to access them, though, because any smaller community is by its nature a pond inside an ocean: you’re always connected to the larger body of water. There are, of course, Circles and Communities, and maybe those will become more the future of the platform. But maybe Musk will throttle those or kill them outright if they’re not providing quote-unquote value. Or maybe just for the fun of it. Who knows?
I’m not particularly excited to be providing value for Elon Musk, as it were. And yes, I guess I’m arguably giving value to someone like Zuckerberg, too, given that I’m on Instagram, ahem, ahem. Though there, Instagram (also a dying platform in its own ways, in part because it’s deeply desperate to be a social media platform that it never was) is a pleasing, dull space — it’s pictures of dogs and books and friends and food, rarely anything else, fairly well-moderated, largely easy for me to control my experience there. Twitter has controls, too, but I turn them on and miss 50% or more of my mentions, and people can still QT and still harass and find ways around the moderation. I’m not on TikTok, because ew, fuck, nobody wants that. Counter-dot-social is whatever, it’s fine. Facebook is barely there, a walled garden where I ask advice for like, “hey what’s this lump.” Is Tumblr still a thing? MySpace? Friendcircuit? Circleface? Do I start an OnlyFans page? Geocities? I dunno.
As yet I’m not leaving Twitter. Certainly I’ll be active through the midterms and my book tour. But after that, it’s a wait and see. I don’t expect to delete my account, and will likely segue it to becoming more broadcast only — talking about my books, and signal boosting books by other authors. Which isn’t too far from how I use it now, honestly. I pulled Twitter off my phone some months back, cutting my usage down considerably, and it immediately improved my general outlook on life, the universe, and everything. I don’t know that it’s super-healthy to be plugged into the Collective Twitter Brain for too long. It’s like VR; eventually, you start to accept this digital simulacrum as reality and accept reality as just artifice. Madness ensues.
What should you do? Well, I dunno, I’m not you. I admire not wanting to bail on it, as Twitter is (despite what I just said) a kind of real life thing. There are genuine people there. Real communities. It is sane to not want to abandon them. Though I’ve seen some rhetoric acting like staying behind is some kind of revolution, an act of resistance where you will, I dunno, damage Musk’s Empire from the inside, but that’s to my mind a bit misguided. You know how when you find out a horrible person controls Home Depot or Martin’s Potato Bread or something, and you choose to not buy from them anymore? That’s this situation. You can’t keep eating at Chik-Fil-A as a form of resistance. “I’ll tank their stock prices and combat homophobia by eating their delicious chicken sandwiches” isn’t really a thing. If your goal is to be against Musk, then you have to use Twitter less, or leave the platform. You provide value by being there. You’re not a stock-holder, you’re a product to be bought and sold. Your account and your tweets cumulatively add value to it. Full-stop. Because like I said, it’s about money. (And for Musk, about ego. And you being there is also about his ego.)
Again, I think it’s fine to stay! Just don’t couch as it an act of rebellion. You stay because you need to or want to, and that’s fine.
So, you do you.
I’ll be around, but less and less, and maybe one day not at all (and that’s true of life, one supposes, as well). Twitter isn’t dead, and declarations of its demise will be surely premature. But that doesn’t mean it’s healthy, either. It’s dying slowly, maybe even starting to smell a little. The rot could be cut out. It could be cured and brought back. But all too often these trips are one-way. Just like in life.
Long live Twitter. Rest in peace, Twitter. May it provide Musk little comfort.
HELLO GOOD FRIENDS, IT IS I, CHNURK MANDOG WITH A NEWS UPDATE FROM THE WORLD OF CHNURK MANDOG.
Ahem.
So some quick updates, right here–
First up, this is the last week for the Dust & Grim October monthly pick promo at Barnes & Noble. Go online or head to a store and nab a paperback copy for just $6.99, where there’s also a buy-one-get-another-at-50% off deal going. Thanks to all who have picked up the book. I hope you enjoy it! Or, at the very least, that you enjoy FLORG. Everyone seems to like FLORG. FLORG 4 EVA.
Second, if you saw my tour dates (right here), you’ll note I’m going to Malaprops in Asheville, NC. And you can now use their pre-order page to pre-order signed and personalized copies through them, and they’ll ship right to you (or you can, y’know, go to the event). Note too that this includes backlist titles of mine, as well. I have never been to the store and am super excited to have an event there. It’s also been way waaaaaay too long since I’ve been to Asheville, honestly. I hear there are good cocktails there? Mmmm.
Third, hey, my new writing book has a COVER — ! Huzzah and hooray and yippie-ki-yay. GENTLE WRITING ADVICE comes out June 2023. The cover copy for the book, first:
Finally–a book of writing advice that accounts for all of the messy, perverse, practical, and inexplicable parts of being a human who writes
The truth is that all of the “writing rules” you’ve learned are bullshit. Sure, they work for some people, but the likelihood that they’ll work for you–unique butterfly of a person that you are–is slim.
That doesn’t mean you’re out of luck! There is meaningful advice to be had in the writing world, and Chuck Wendig is here to deliver it. In this hilarious guide, Wendig will help you discover more about yourself as a writer, parse through your quirks and foibles, and help you figure out the best way for you to get words on the page–without destroying yourself along the way.
With behind-the-scenes stories of Wendig’s own writing struggles, sections on debunking popular advice, self-care tips, and more footnotes than are strictly necessary (or legally recommended by scientists), Gentle Writing Advice will give the unvarnished truth about the writing process and remind you of what’s actually important–taking care of the writer. (That’s you, by the way.)
And then, the cover!
It features a soul-bird bursting free from your head-cage! Which is a metaphor for writing! Probably! I don’t know!
The Book of Accidents lands on a list of the 53 Best Horror Books of All Time, at Men’s Health, alongside some legends and heavy-hitters, and I’m honored.
