* * *

Indiebound / Amazon / B&N / Robot Trading Company / Add on Goodreads

Miriam Black knows how you’re going to die. All it takes is a touch — a little skin-to-skin action. Now someone — some rich asshole from Florida — wants to pay her so he can find out how he’s going to die. But when she touches him, she receives a message sent back through time and written in blood: HELLO, MIRIAM. It’s a taunt, a warning, and the start of a dangerous and deadly game for everybody’s favorite carcinogenic psychic, Miriam Black.

* * *

And so we begin with the flagship entry of the Five Thing I Learned series, wherein a writer explains five things she learned by writing her newest book.

In this case, I’m the writer testing these waters — and also laying down what this will look like for those storytellers who may want to participate in the future.

The Cormorant came out this past Tuesday and is already a New York Times bestseller — I am of course writing this before the book is released so I’m assuming that’s true, right?

Fellas? Ladies? Anybody? Bestseller?

*is handed a note*

Oh.

Well. *clears throat* Moving on, then.

Let’s just get into it, then. Five things I learned while writing The Cormorant.

1. You Gain Energy By Jiggering With Structure

The Miriam Black books have always had a slightly non-linear structure in that the tale deviates from the timeline in the first two books by offering glimpses backward through what I call interludes — flashbacks or deviations that show up when they’re needed and (ideally) perform the service of showing an event rather than having me or Miriam tell you the event. But outside of the “interview” conceit found in the first book, Blackbirds, that’s all this was: a timeline of the now punctuated by these flashback interludes.

The Cormorant changes that, somewhat. We begin with Miriam handcuffed to a table in a beach shack, grilled by two people who claim to be federal law enforcement — and we see things that don’t yet make sense. Miriam is wounded. Miriam has a mystery box. The characters also elude to things that we don’t yet understand: a dead boy in a Philadelphia Eagles jacket, for instance. Then we begin the story of how Miriam gets to this point — making the book ostensibly one giant flashback — sometimes punctuated with a return to the scene in the shack or to other flashbacks and nightmares. Then the story as a whole catches up to the timeline to finish the tale.

Hopefully, if what I’m hearing is true from reviewers and early readers (AND THEY WOULDN’T LIE TO ME BECAUSE I TURN INTO BEARD HULK WHEN I’M ANGRY AND ALSO WHEN I’M HUNGRY OR EVEN JUST MILDLY PERTURBED), then this structure serves to ratchet tension tighter and create more suspense — it’s like, I’m already telling you a little bit of what’s happened, I’m just not telling you how it happened. It’s like a controlled-environment spoiler. Where men and women in hazmat suits carry glowing spoiler material with industrial tongs.

2. You Can Also Confuse People This Way

The structure of your story is like a Jenga tower. You can pull pieces out and hand them to somebody and the tower will wibble and wobble, but at least initially will stay standing. But you go fucking with it too much and then the whole thing crashes down around your ears and then you shake your fists to the sky as the Jenga rain pours down and you scream NOOOOOOOoooo.

Early drafts of the book got some notes from those primary readers that could best be described as them giving me the face of a dog trying to understand trigonometry. (Or hell, even a dog trying to understand a banana.) Big blinky question marks above their head.

Reason for this: the structure served to highlight confusion, not clarity.

So, I had to do further rejiggering, lest the whole Jenga tower come tumbling down.

3. Florida Keys: The American Fringe

You know how in a lot of sci-fi space novels you hear tell of distant colonies and those colonists are always odd in some way? “Oh, those Saturnheads eat cheese curds and wear rings on their heads and they marry lampposts and rocking chairs. Fringe-dwellers! Weird fuckers.”

That has a real world analog and that analog is the far-flung fringes of the USA. Go to Hawaii. Or the Florida Keys. Or from what I hear, to Alaska, and you find people who seem like they were trying to escape the country without leaving the country, or you find folks who were shaken out of the dice cup before anybody got to roll them. I don’t say this by way of an insult — I think it’s awesome. The fact that you can get that ex-pat feel but still be inside the country is fascinating. In Hawaii we found people selling pot on the Big Island with a big-ass sign outside their driveway. And in the Keys I met folks who still adhered to that whole Conch Republic vibe (the Keys once played at seceding from the country to become their own nation: the Conch Republic).

I was in line at a grocery store buying suntan lotion and the checkout guy literally started lecturing me on how taxation by the U.S. government was basically a crime against the Constitution. To be clear: I did not invite this conversation. It just happened when he told me how much I had to pay and with taxes, what the final amount was.

The Keys are like a set of broken teeth flung into the water as if by a child’s hand — hundreds of little islands, some strung together by the stitching of a single highway, many left disconnected from the rest. Down there it’s a whole lot of drinking and fishing and killer sunsets and old pirates and the occasional drug-dealer submersible. It’s a cool place with weird people.

I like weird people.

Weird people make great stories.

And weird people make excellent Miriam Black fodder.

4. What Write You Know Is An Opportunity, Not A Commandment

Write what you know isn’t a rule. It’s an option. A solution to a problem, the problem of, “I don’t know how to write this.” The solution being, “I’ll go learn about this thing in order to write it.”

Simply put: it’s easier to write something you know than to write something you don’t.

Three-quarters of The Cormorant is set in Florida. Much of that in and around Miami or the Keys. I’d never been to either and I could have very easily just took a guess at it — check Google Street View, do some reading, and have that be enough. And were I restricting this to a chapter or two, I would’ve done exactly that.

But most of the book was going to take place there, and I didn’t want to be caught writing bullshit about a real place in the same way you don’t want to read erotica from some unlearned prude who’s never had sex before (“And then he pressed his testicles into her clitoral pucker…”). I figured, hey, it was worth a trip down to America’s hot moist land-wang, see what was what.

I’m glad I did. The book wrote itself in my head as I was there. Sometimes it’s big things: geography or history or in my case actually coming face to face with a real-live cormorant. Sometimes it’s little things: the way the air smells, the way people behave, a conversation you have. Moments big and little, images and feelings and realizations coming together.

You don’t have to always write what you know. Often, you can’t.

But when you can? Whoo-boy, it makes things a whole lot easier.

(I imagine, as a sidenote, this is why Stephen King writes about Maine so often. Not only does he love it, but he knows it. Knows the place, knows the people, because it’s a part of him.)

Some further thoughts on Write What You Know, if you care to read ’em.

5. Characters That Are Fun To Write Are Easy To Write

Speaking of easy? Miriam Black is fun to write. She’s a horrible person who does good things, or maybe a good person who does horrible things. Awful stuff flies out of her mouth to keep people at bay so she doesn’t have to get close to them or risk them actually caring about her or worse, her caring about them. Actually, a reviewer, Terry Irving, said something I liked:

“Miriam Black is a solid taut block of arrogance, anger, and screaming rage–except that when you look back at what she’s actually done, you see a very different person. Someone who wants others to be happy, hates the death that washes around her, and never, ever stops fighting. (The descriptions of the muscular, desperate, physicality of her battles are worth the entire book alone). She isn’t a fake bad person nor a fake good person–she’s really both.”

She’s mean. And witty. And cruel. An anti-hero who sometimes flirts with being a real hero.

And that makes her fun to write.

Thing is, when a book is fun to write — often because of the characters in that book — the actual writing of said book zips along like a squirrel with ants biting its butthole.

It took me five years to write Blackbirds. It took me 30 days to write Mockingbird and 45 days to write The Cormorant. Like I said the other day in my post about 2014 writing resolutions, you have to get excited about what you’re writing. You have to find the You-Shaped Hole into the story. Miriam is why I get excited about these stories. Her mechanism — by which I mean, her psychic power — is part of that. But if you can get excited about one thing in your work, get excited about the characters. It’s why we read books, really. It’s always about people, dontcha know?

Anyway, just as Miriam and The Cormorant was fun to write…

I hope it’s fun to read, too.

* * *

Indiebound / Amazon / B&N / Robot Trading Company / Add on Goodreads

It’s time for another photo contest.

(You can see the results of last year’s Blue Blazes photo contest right here.)

What You Could Win

Got two prizes up for grabs, each available to those in the United States only…

…unless you’re willing to shell out international shipping.

Now, the first prize ideally would’ve been a bottle of whiskey and a carton of cigarettes, but I don’t think I’m supposed to ship those over state lines, particularly with Pennsylvania’s truly peculiar laws surrounding the transport of booze to places that are not Pennsylvania.

Instead, I thought: hey, how about coffee? Black coffee. (Get it? Miriam Black? Shut up.)

I mean, c’mon, Miriam Black has a heart of coffee grounds and blood of bitter brew, so it works.

So, the first prize?

It’s a Chemex Starter Bundle from La Colombe coffee. You get: a Chemex brewer, a scale, Chemex filters, and a bag of whole bean La Colombe coffee.

Second prize is a big-ass stack of books from yours truly. That includes: Blackbirds, Mockingbird, Under the Empyrean Sky, The Kick-Ass Writer, Beyond Dinocalypse, Unclean Spirits, and Double Dead. All mauled with the clumsy thing I call an “autograph” if you care to have your books devalued in this manner.

I’ll choose my favorite photo, who gets first pick of the two prize packs.

Then the readers of this blog will choose their favorite photo.

How This Works (The Short Version)

You take a picture of yourself with my new book, The Cormorant.

You send that picture to me at terribleminds [at] gmail [dot] com.

Maybe you win some stuff. Yay.

How This Works (The Long Version)

You go get yourself a copy of The Cormorant. Physical or digital is fine, though physical books usually make for a better picture. Snap a photo of you with the book.

The only requirements of this photo are that it contains You + The Cormorant.

That said, your job is to amuse, bewilder, disturb, or thrill me. Bonus points toward those who tie the photo in some way to the motifs or themes within the book: birds, blood, death, Florida, cigarettes, booze, character cosplay, and so on, and so forth.

Creativity will be rewarded, is what I’m saying.

Again, winner needs to be in the US unless said participant is willing to shell out for international shipping, which usually ain’t cheap.

Take the photo and send me the results between now and 11:59PM on Friday, January 17th [NOTE: this is now extended a week as some folks have noted a delay in getting their copies!].

(Which means you’ve got about ten days to jump on in.)

Again: the winner I choose gets first pick of the two prizes. Then we’ll take another week to vote for our favorite follow-up photo and that person gets the second prize. Unless you want to like, arm-wrestle for it, but that’s on you guys to figure out.

One entry only, please.

And that’s it. Them’s the contest.

Buy the book.

Snap the shot.

Send me the photo.

The end.

Questions? Comments? Complaints? Prayer requests? Marriage proposals?

Last year, I did 25 writer resolutions for 2013 —

This year, I thought I’d add some more thought-midden to the steaming ordure heap that is this blog and toss out another ten resolutions for 2014.

Check ’em out, and if you feel so inclined: add your own to the comments below.

I Will Understand The Value Of Writing Advice

Writing advice as it exists, unregarded, is entirely neutral. It’s no different from me telling you how to make great chocolate chip cookies, or my favorite way to groom one’s pubic shrubbery, or the “best” way to get to Big Dan-Don’s Dildo Barn and Enchilada Factory. It’s either a pocket full of gold of a fist full of hot garbage — meaning, it either works for you or it damn well doesn’t. None of this — including anything I say here at this blog — is gospel. If a piece of advice sounds interesting or presents a solution to a problem of yours, then fuck yeah. Pick it up, try it out, see what happens. If it doesn’t inspire a change or challenge you to do differently? Then drop it like an angry squirrel. Also worth noting you should firmly get your order of operations straight: the writing comes first. The talking-and-reading-about-writing comes second. Writing advice is here to support your art, not support the illusion of your art.

I Will Try New Shit

It’s a weird new world out there for writers, and fortune favors the bold and occasionally batshit. Everything is changing. New tech. New ways to reach an audience. New ways to allow your audience to support you. And these changes in publishing can allow for changes in storytelling, too — the traditional system will remain in place and will continue to do the job it’s doing, but it will never be able to (or be willing to) accommodate riskier forms or formats. And that’s where you come in. Don’t you hate eating out with those people who get the same thing every time? “I’ll have the koala quesadillas with the deep-friend chimichurri hamster-bombs on the side. I’ll have these again and again until I die.” Nobody wants to see a storyteller do the same thing again and again, either. Be brave. Get weird. None of this is guaranteed. Safe art is boring art. Try stuff.

I Will Think More About Writing Than I Will About Publishing

You need to think about publishing. You do! It’s important. Publishing is how your work gets into the world. It’s how your story reaches its audience. You should be aware of your options and play those options. But at the end of the day, you’re more interesting as a writer. You will succeed in the long run based on how you write and on the stories you tell, not on what method of publishing you choose. Publishing is a container, and while choice of container is certainly important, it’s not the reason you’re here. If the only thing that makes you interesting is how you publish, your time in this creative place has a very short clock.

I Will Stop Thinking Of Myself As A Brand

Coca-Cola is a brand. Burger King is a brand. Big Dan-Don’s is a brand (“American Dildos made by American* Hands!”). A brand is a corporate identity. It is the standard-bearer of comfort and consistency: same burger every time, same bowl of cereal, same firm-but-squishy dongs. You are not a brand. You are a human being. Writing is your craft. Story is your art. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: who wants to read a story by a brand? (“Ah, the erotic culinary autobiography of the Burger King. Finally, it is mine.”) Your voice is what matters. Your ideas are what mark you. Your milkshake is what brings all the boys to the yard. You know what a brand is? A brand is the thing they use to mark a cow so that it gets identified with the rest of the mooing herd.

* translation: South American hands

I Will Protect Myself From Malefaction

Lotta sneaky fuckers out there who want to separate you from your money, your work, your good will toward man. Protect yourself. Check Writer Beware. Get a lawyer or a reputable agent to look over any deals. Eschew One-True-Wayism lest it drive you into a lake like some old-ass GPS that doesn’t have its maps updated. Stay frosty, word-nerds.

I Will Give My Work The Time It Needs

Sometimes a story comes out fast. Sometimes it comes out slow. And this isn’t just about a single story: learning to do this thing and do it well may not take the arbitrary 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell suggests, but it’s not learning to play beer pong, either. Overnight successes never are; what you see is just the iceberg’s peak poking out of the slush. This takes time. From ideation to action. From writing one junk novel to a worse novel to a better one to the ninth one that’s actually worth a good goddamn. From writing to rewriting to editing to copyediting. Don’t “just click publish.” Don’t just send it off half-baked to some editor or agent — they get hundreds of stories a day that are the narrative equivalent to a sloppy equine miscarriage or half-eaten ham salad sandwich. Don’t punish your potential readers by squatting over the Amazon toilet and voiding your creative bowels into the digital porcelain. Take pride in what you do. Go the distance and get shit done. Not just a little bit done, but all-the-way-to-the-awesome-end done.

I Will Earn My Audience

You don’t build an audience like it’s a fucking chair. And you don’t beat your potential audience about the head and neck with that goddamn chair, either. You earn them by being the best version of you. You earn them by being passionate and awesome and not-an-asshole. You don’t earn them by bickering. You don’t earn them through intrusive marketing missives. You don’t earn them through blathering yelly-screamy auto-DMs or through giant Hulk fists made of quivering spam. You earn them by being a person. A person who happens to have many amazing stories to share.

I Will Respect The Role Of Storyteller

Not everybody gets how awesome stories are. Not everyone understands how important they are. Stories are how we communicate. They’re how we talk to one another after a long day of work. They’re how we relate details of our world to our children. It’s how we impart lessons. It’s how we inform and update. Storytelling is news, entertainment, myth, religion, memory. As humans, we’re biologically a turbid broth of genetics — but intellectually, we’re stitched of a complex quilt of storytelling memetics. Other people won’t respect your role. They think what you’re doing is a half-a-jar of horseshit. But being a storyteller? Choosing to do this thing? It matters. Stories make the world go around. Respect the role, and your choice of it. Storytellers matter.

I Will Get Excited About What I’m Writing

Ten years of freelance writing taught me one thing: you have to find a way to get excited about a day’s worth of writing, or it’ll juice your mind like an orange in the hand of Andre the Giant. It’ll kill you and your love of it, because writing stuff every day that isn’t precisely yours is — well, it’s many times better than doing the hard work of being a retail countermonkey (been there), but it still becomes a kind of drudgery. And so what you do is you find a way to be excited about the work. You still make it yours. You own it. You claim it with the flag of your voice thrust into the earth of the work. And this is true with any writing you’ve got going on, whether it’s a personal project or freelance or a story you’re forced to continue at the hands of a rabid fan who has kidnapped you and hobbled you by chopping off your foot (YOU DIRTY BIRDIE, YOU). Discover your own door into the material. Find the You-shaped hole in every story. Getting excited during a day of writing makes it go easier. It makes it fun and insane and is one of the many things that can elevate the raw ore of craft to the glittery baubles of art. Get geeked about your story. Write what thrills you. Every day of writing, sit down and ask: what am I going to write that excites me today?

I Will Write

The simplest commandment of them all: write. Write a little or a lot every day but goddamnit, write. Whether it’s 350 words or 3500 — the only way out is through. Put words down. Smash them together and force them to tell stories. Boot distractions into the trash bin. Kick haters into the wood chipper. Get shut of fear — what are you afraid of? Not being good enough? You don’t get to good enough by sitting on your ass and staring into your hands. Drown your doubt in a washtub. We all have doubt. We’re all plagued by the bitey monkeys of uncertainty — the difference is, some folks let the monkeys weigh them down, and other folks just keep on staggering forward, flinging those chattering doubt-gibbons and fear-baboons into the brush. Write! Write. Write. Write your way through 2014 — a year in words, a year in stories, a year in getting shit done.

* * *

Out now:

All the way she’s been listening to whatever random radio stations she can get on the dial, and it occurs to her slowly (but surely) that music basically sucks these days. Hollow, soulless pop music, shallower than a gob of jizz drying on a hot sidewalk. Even the country music sounds more like pop – gone are the singular miseries of my wife left me, my truck broke down, all I got left is my dog and my shotgun and the blue hills of Kentucky and now it’s sugar-fed Barbies twanging on about ex-boyfriends and drinking Jack-and-Cokes and she’s pretty sure Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton are clawing out of their graves somewhere – though, wait, are the two of them even dead?

Shit, she’s not sure.

Once in a while she gets a station that plays something worth a damn: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Nirvana, Cowboy Junkies, Zeppelin, Johnny Cash, Nine Inch Nails, Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails. It troubles her that music from the 1980s is now “oldies” music. Hard to picture a bunch of geriatrics thumping their walkers around to 99 Luftballons.

Most of the time the dial just finds static. Whispers of dead air. Crackles of voices lost in the noise.

Sometimes she thinks they’re talking to her.

“–mothers don’t love their daughters–”

“– dead people – ksssh – everywhere–”

“– fire on route 1 – St. Augustine–”

“– wicked polly–”

“– river is rising–”

“– it is what it is–”

Now she’s on this hellfire-and-brimstone station. Some preacher hollering on about depravities and Leviticus and the ho-mo-sek-shul menace, suggesting that God is so squicked out by two dudes kissing that he’s willing to once more drown the world in another hate-flood. Which, to Miriam’s mind, suggests that God doth protest too much. Maybe that’s why he booted Satan out of heaven. Maybe they were blowing each other.

She waits for lightning to strike her in her seat.

It does not.

She cackles.

She finishes off her Red Bull and throws it in the back. It clanks against the other energy drink cans. Those things taste like cough syrup that’s been fermenting in the mouth of a dead goat, but shit, they work.

Eventually, her bladder is like a yippy terrier that wants to go out. And the Fiero – which she has named Red Rocket – hungers for gas.

She steps out of the car at a rickety podunk gas station not far from Daytona Beach, and as soon as she does, the heat hits her. It’s like a hug from a hot jogger. Sticky. Heavy heaving bosoms. All-encompassing. A hot blanket of flesh on flesh. Gone is the rush of air conditioning from the car and already she feels the sweat beading on her brow. Ew, gods, yuck.

This is winter? Thirty seconds in she already feels like a swamp.

Florida: America’s hot, moist land-wang.

Everything’s bright. She fumbles on the dash for a pair of sunglasses and quickly throws them on. She feels like a vampire dragged out into the sun for the first time. How long will it be before she bursts into flames, burns down like one of her cigarettes? A char-shaped statue of Miriam Black.

She hurries into the gas station – a round-cheeked Cuban dude watches her with some fascination, like he’s seeing Nosferatu shy away from the judging rays of the Day God – and darts into the bathroom.

Into the stall. Rusty door closed. Someone has peed on the seat, which always astounds her. Men are basically orangutans in good clothes, so she gets that they ook and flail and get piss everywhere. But women? Shouldn’t the ladies be better than this? Why is there pee on the toilet seat? Hoverers, she thinks. That’s what it is. They hover over the seat like a UFO over a cornfield, trying to avoid the last woman’s pee – also a hoverer, in a grim urine-soaked cycle – and then pssshhh. Splash. Spray. Lady-whiz everywhere. The cycle continues.

Miriam does the civilized thing – a rarity for her but in bathrooms she apparently reverts and becomes a member of the human species – and wads up toilet paper around her hands to make gloves. She cleans the seat. Scowling and cursing the whole time. Then she sits. And she pees.

In here it’s dark and it’s cool, at least.

Outside the stall, the bathroom door opens.

Someone else comes in.

Footsteps echoing. Little splashes as they step through water.

Then: clang.

Something drops. Metal on metal. A loud sound, a jarring sound – it gives Miriam’s heart a stun-gun jolt. A scrape. A splash.

She peers under the door.

The bent and bitten edge of a red snow shovel drags along the floor. A pair of muddy boots walks it along.

Miriam’s sweat goes cold.

No no no, not here, not now.

The footsteps approach. Slapping against the soaked floor.

Miriam feels her pulse in her neck: a rabbit’s pulse, thumping against the inside of her skin like a hard finger flicking. Her throat feels tight.

The boots stop just outside the stall.

Snow slides off their tops. Plop, plop. Melting on the tile.

Red runnels of blood crawl toward Miriam’s feet.

A twinge of something inside her: an infant’s fist twisting her guts. Then the woman outside her door drops something:

A purple paisley handkerchief.

The blood runs to it. Soaks through to it.

Fear transforms. A spitting rain into a booming thundercloud. It’s anger now, jagged and defiant, a piece of broken glass chewed in the mouth – and Miriam roars, kicks out with her own black boot–

The door swings open. It slams against the other door.

Nobody’s there. No woman with a red shovel. No boots. No snow, no blood, no gangbanger’s handkerchief.

Miriam sighs. Massages the heels of her hands into her eyes, pressing hard, running them in circles. In the blue-black behind her eyes, fireworks explode and blur and fade – no sound, just silent flashes of light from her pressing hard on her own eyes.

“At least you have both eyes,” comes a voice. Louis. Not-Louis.

The Trespasser, more like it.

She opens her eyes. A vulture sits on the lip of the sink in front of the stall. Bowing its featherless match-tip head. Beak clacking as it speaks.

“You’re the key,” the bird says, “but what’s the lock?”

“What?”

“Or are you the lock and someone else is the key?”

Miriam’s hands are shaking. “Speak sense, bird.”

“Are you going to see Mommy while you’re here?”

Miriam flings her keys at the big black scavenger.

The keyring rebounds off the sink, then the mirror, then lands in the well of a different sink. The bird is gone. One black feather remains, stuck to the grimy porcelain with a waxy bead of blood.

Miriam finishes peeing, rescues the keys, then hurries out.

* * *

Indiebound / Amazon / B&N / Robot Trading Company / Add on Goodreads

Miriam Black knows how you’re going to die.

All it takes is a touch — a little skin-to-skin action.

Now someone — some rich asshole from Florida — wants to pay her so he can find out how he’s going to die. But when she touches him, she receives a message sent back through time and written in blood: HELLO, MIRIAM. It’s a taunt, a warning, and the start of a dangerous and deadly game for everybody’s favorite carcinogenic psychic, Miriam Black.

What’s In This Book?

Birds. Blood. Bad language.

Also: sex.

Also: old enemies, new friends, other psychics, more mythology.

Also: Florida (aka “America’s Hot-Moist Land-Wang”)! Miriam’s mother! Drunkenness! Mayhem! Santa Claus! An engagement ring! Violent recriminations! Boats! Water! Ascerbic Wit!

Did I mention birds, blood, and bad language?

I did?

Excellent.

Why Should I Read This Book?

Because you read Blackbirds and/or Mockingbird and want the third in the series.

Because you haven’t read those and you wanna start with this one.

Because you like your fantasy dark. Because you like gritty with a side of grim, but you also like it served with a shotglass full of sunshine.

Because you like your characters capable but complex, active but maaaaybe a little unsound…

Because you want to hear what Miriam will say or do next.

Because I’ve never had more fun writing a book.

Because the ending, which I’ll apologize for in advance.

Because you want to support this site.

Because hot damn, what a cover.

Because I have all your pets hostage.

Book Launch in Brooklyn

January 8th.

Word Bookstore in Brooklyn, NY.

7:00PM.

Be there.

1000 Words of Miriam Black

Read Chapter 10 of the novel, right here.

What Others Are Saying

“Chuck Wendig writes a goddamn good book.” — Booked Podcast

“The plot is strong and weird and fits Miriam like a black leather glove with the fingers cut off. It turns and twists and dives – I sat up all night reading this damn book on my cell phone, for Pete’s sake. It’s well put together, nuanced, and in the end, satisfying–with no easy outs. Now, what interested me about The Cormorant was that everything I’ve just written is completely true and yet, it’s only about half of what’s really going on. The writing is a scary, wild, obscene crash of sound and yet there are elements and overtones of Shakespeare and Rimbaud and Dante hidden deep inside. Miriam Black is a solid taut block of arrogance, anger, and screaming rage – except that when you look back at what she’s actually done, you see a very different person. Someone who wants others to be happy, hates the death that washes around her, and never, ever stops fighting. (The descriptions of the muscular, desperate, physicality of her battles are worth the entire book alone). She isn’t a fake bad person nor a fake good person–she’s really both.” — Terry Irving (writing what is maybe one of my favoritest reviews of my books ever, because damn if he doesn’t get Miriam)

“Books that play around with time jumps and framing are also tough to pull off, but Chuck Wendig does it here perfectly, switching to flashbacks and other perspectives at the most appropriate moments, emphasizing the suspense when it is most required. Reading this one was like a roller coaster ride, except there are no dips, only highs and loop-de-loops. Between the outrageous things Miriam says and finding all about the creepy villain in this book, my butt alternated from being perched on the edge of my seat one moment to being laughed off the next.” — BiblioSanctum

“Miriam Black is back. Irreverent and sardonic as ever. I don’t know how Chuck Wendig manages to find that balance of brash irreverence without taking it too far, but he is a master… I loved Blackbirds and really liked Mockingbird, but this third one blew away my expectations, or rather maybe Miriam put them in their place with a good dose of foul language and bad assery. In other words, I absolutely loved it.” — Tenacious Reader

“Cormorant, as is usual for this series, delivers action and creeps in spades, but the dim light at the end of the long dark tunnel of Miriam’s life is now just a little bit brighter. Miriam’s story remains an undeniably addictive one, and I finished this in one sitting. Wendig’s writing is better than ever, and this series continues to surprise and terrify in equal measure.” – My Bookish Ways

“First and foremost, holy crap. If there is an author out there these days who is better than Chuck Wendig at taking you by the throat rather than the hand without so much as a how-do-you-do first, I haven’t encountered them. The Cormorant starts off not only strong, but fast and furious – and it stays that way from beginning to end.” — Over The Effing Rainbow

“This is one of the best urban fantasy series out there.” — Talk Supe

“The storytelling is excellent. It’s gripping. It’s compelling. It’s like a train wreck that you can’t tear your eyes away from. Did I mention that I loved this book?” — Lynn’s Book Blog

“I don’t suggest reading The Cormorant on public transport unless you don’t mind missing your stop.” — Amberkatze’s Book Blog

“Chuck Wendig structures this book brilliantly… you are still kept guessing all the way to the last page.” — Bite The Book

“Frankly, I find it one of the most compulsively readable series in any genre.” — Adventures Fantastic

“Miriam’s powers mean something to people, and she’s playing defense not only for herself, but for other people now. It’s a great shift for the series, and one that’s making it a little more essential from volume to volume.” — Fruitless Pursuits

“Wendig does it again with this furious installment in the Miriam Black series. Miriam is angry, bitter and conflicted as ever, but this time she doesn’t have Louis to help her. She’s on her own, after having left him behind. I really love Miriam. She’s the devil on my shoulder, the bad words in my head. She’s the voice that I hear the split second before I pause and say something that’s  more PC. Luckily, Miriam doesn’t have that problem and what she thinks pretty much comes out of her mouth. She’s hilarious, strong, edgy. She’s punch in the gut and then a drink of kool-aid.” — The Windy Pages

“I read The Cormorant in a single sitting, for me there is just something wonderfully addictive about Miriam’s acerbic personality; she can destroy people with a single utterance. Sometimes waspish, often harsh, her barbed comments are a constant delight (well, as long as you’re not on the receiving end of them). It’s nice to see that as this series has developed Miriam has evolved as a character along with it. Slowly but surely the author has revealed the different layers to her personality.” — The Eloquent Page

I started a Tonx Coffee subscription because —

Well, because Tonx Coffee roasts deliriously amazing coffee.

A wide variety. Delivered every two weeks.

Perfect for you folks who followed my Chemex advice from a few weeks ago.

Anyway, if you wanna check out Tonx, they gave me a referral link (and with full disclosure, I get some kinda awesome swag if these references take root — like, maybe a coffee mug, and also a magic pony that shits out mystical coffee beans), and that link is right here: CLICK THIS MYSTERIOUS LINK.

Seriously amazing coffee.

If not them, then try La Colombe. Because, whoa.