I don’t actually know what’s wrong with all of you — I’m suspecting some kind of brain parasite transmitted via Twitter — but yesterday my Twitter follower count shuddered and clicked over to the 25,000 mark. So: confetti, ponies, sex orgy, bourbon, etc.

Anyway, so I thought this was a good time to give away some books.

I’ll give away all three Miriam Black books — the first two (Blackbirds and Mockingbird) will be signed paperback copies, and Cormorant (aka, book three) will be a digital copy.

Here’s how you get ’em:

a) Be from the United States, or be willing to pay international shipping / accept e-books instead.

b) Between 6AM and 11:59PM EST on December 4th, 2013, tweet what you think the next Miriam Black book should be called — note that all Miriam Black books have thus far been named after a bird, so, you should do that, too. You must include a link to this blog post! Oh, and most important part of them all because it’s how the NSA oh sorry I will track you — use the hashtag:

#miriamblackbookfour

c) The next Miriam Black book will actually be called Thunderbird, so don’t use that name.

d) One entry per person, please.

e) The next morning (12/5), I’ll do a random draw from those who have used the hashtag. After I eat breakfast and drink coffee and clean up whatever dead body I’ve been sleeping next to all night thanks to another one of my violent, hallucinogenic fugue states.

I’ll shout out the winner here and on Twitter.

And for the rest of you — hey, Cormorant lands at the end of the month, dontchaknow?

Preorder The Cormorant: Indiebound / Amazon / B&N / Add on Goodreads

Your coffee maker has failed you.

And, in turn, you have failed your coffee.

You’ve been handed a gift. Coffee beans are from MOTHER EARTH. The Earth pushed them up out of her body for you, and you’re just taking them and, and — what? Pulverizing them in the mouth of a golden retriever with halitosis. Then running them through some stanky drip coffee makes you bought from a flea market for like, seven bucks and is full of insidious black mold. Or, gods, worse, you’re using one of those K-Cup things. Those were invented for people whose tastebuds were destroyed in the war. You know what’s in a K-Cup? Coffee from the Soviet era. Limestone driveway gravel. Pubes from raccoons who died in housefires. If you’re going to drink coffee from K-Cups, you might as well eat grass-fed beef out of a dirty gym sock, or drink Lagavulin whisky after it’s first been passed through the intestinal tract of a sickly flamingo. It’s gross.

You’re just… you’re just bumming the rest of us out.

It is time to fix this. Time to pay your coffee the respect it deserves, a respect it rarely gets with Starbucks out there charring every bean that comes through their door with a flamethrower.

It is time to meet my new friend, The Chemex.

After doing a hasty and lazy read on the history of the Chemex pour-over coffee carafe, I learn that it was invented during World War II and was used as a weapon against the Nazis. Each soldier was given a Chemex when they stormed the beaches of Normandy. Why? Ah! Because the glass bell of the hourglass-shaped Chemex would take the lasers from the Nazis’ ultra-pistols and reflect them back at the bunkers and —

*is handed a note*

Okay, I’ve just been informed that this is all sheer conjecture.

We can’t say for sure that the Nazis had laser pistols and —

*is handed a note*

We can say for sure?

*one more note*

FINE, the Nazis didn’t have laser pistols, whatever.

Point is, the Chemex is awesome and has been around for a good long while. Invented in the 1940s, it now sits in various museums as an example of elegant design and stylistic function. It is also the preferred coffee maker of James Bond. True story.

I decided to check out the Chemex because my current drip maker — a very solid entry from the fine folks at Cuisinart — makes a nice and reliable cup but also seems to lose a lot of the powerful differentiation between beans and roasts. I could buy great quality beans and it would still make roughly the same cup of coffee as a meh-ehh-whatever quality of beans. Light roasts tasted only marginally lighter than medium or dark roasts. Minimal complexity.

Plus, I also learned that my burr grinder — a “Tru” grinder — was labeled a burr but wasn’t actually a burr grinder. (A burr grinder is a series of gnashing burrs plucked from the hide of a forest-trampling grizzly bear and — *is handed a note* — okay, never mind, that is not accurate.)

I’ve always been a half-a-coffee snob, and so I thought maybe it was either time to commit to the snobbery or just bury myself in a giant K-Cup and get it over with. The problem is, to be a full-bore coffee snob might seem at first to be a rather costly endeavor. A quality burr grinder will cost you the innocence of a small child plus a bag of two-headed kittens. A really great drip machine or espresso machine is the same price as a military-grade hovercraft.

I’m a coffee snob, but also occasionally kinda cheap.

Er, “frugal.”

Research showed me a couple things, though:

First, some cheap coffee makers were available. French press, which I already owned (and liked, though my grinder never got the grind right because hey oops my grinder was some Jawa-rigged rust-bucket bean-chewing droid that turned some of my coffee into boulders and some of it into microscopic dust particles). Then: the Aeropress, which was a sort of rocket-scientist version of the French press. And finally:

The Chemex.

Next problem: the grinder.

I saw some folks recommend a hand grinder for something that was cheap and simple and kept a fairly consistent grind. The downside being, hey, you’ve gotta actually put some sweat equity into riding that sweet caffeine-horse to coffee-town.

I went ahead and got a Chemex, an Aeropress, a Hario hand grinder, a Bonavita electric kettle with the swan neck, and a digital scale. I nabbed this from La Colombe, who threw in a bag of coffee.

SO BEGAN MY ASCENT TO SUPERIOR COFFEE SNOBBERY.

Because what happened was, I made one cup of coffee using the Chemex.

And I got the best cup of coffee I’d ever made.

Perhaps the best cup I’d ever consumed.

Here’s how I explain it —

You know how, when you open a bag of coffee, it has that heady, potent, magical smell? And you know how, once you grind that coffee, the smell only intensifies? And your nose detects a wealth of little eccentricities in the ground beans: coffee and wine and smoke and cherry and the sweat from an electrocuted man and a dreams of a sleeping blue whale and the earthen grave-loam of a dead god’s burial mound? And then you brew the coffee and almost all of that is completely lost? Submerged in a wash of straight-up coffee taste? Tang of bitterness?

This was the first time I’d ever brewed a cup that tasted like the beans smelled.

I couldn’t believe it. It was a coffee revelation. Angels descended. They karate-kicked me in the mouth, which gave me 10,000 new tastebuds. They sang songs of Panama, and Haiti, and Guatemala. They replaced my blood with Kona coffee. They made love to me.

It was a very meditative experience, actually. Soothing. Hand-grinding. Pouring the water in slow, deliberate spirals. I felt more involved, more active. I liked slowing it down. Watching all the processes happen. Fascinating stuff.

It’s not a joke when I say I haven’t used my drip maker since.

Mornings for me are either Chemex or Aeropress — the latter making something akin to an espresso pull (sans any kind of crema), the former being a straight-up killer cuppa coffee.

So. Chemex. Try it.

How I Brew It

You’d think there’d be one way to make coffee in this very simple maker, but that’s not true. For every user of the Chemex is, I suspect, a slightly tweaked snowflake method of brewing coffee with it. This is evidenced by the many brew guides and brew videos on the web — each slightly different than the one before it. I thought I’d detail my brew method below, which hews pretty close to the standard but offers one or two notable tweaks.

Fill the kettle halfway with tap water. Boil it. Make it bubble with watery rage.

Get your Chemex. Get your Chemex filter, which is a thick, surly filter — so potent that if you filter blood through it, it allows only the victim’s fear and illusions to seep through into the carafe. That’s some motherfucking forensic science right there, homesauce.

Pour the boiling water through the filter. Wet the sides so it sticks to the glass. You’re saying, HA HA STUPID WENDIG YOU FORGOT THE COFFEE to which I respond by misting you in the eyes and mouth with Axe Body Spray as punishment for your insolence. The goal here is to remove any papery taste from the filter, to help the filter stick to the carafe, and to warm the carafe.

Now: pour into the kettle 20 oz. of good filtered water. That’s two and a half cups.

Time to get out the scale. Put in some kind of container (a glass dish, the grinder container, a lemur skull, whatever) and tare it out. Apply beans until you get to 40 grams. This is roughly like, 2-3 tablespoons, but every bean is different so — eh? USE A SCALE, YOU SAVAGE.

Set your grind to be medium to coarse. Somewhere in the middle.

A moment, now, about bean selection. I get my beans at present from La Colombe, but I also tried a sample from Tonx recently and the beans they sent were aces. For the Chemex I like a lot of light-to-medium roasts. Anything too aggressive is best for the Aeropress, I think.

Grind your coffee. In the grinder. Not under your boot like some kind of thug. Not in your mouth. Not between two bricks. In a good grinder. Hand grinder. Burr grinder. That’s it. You get one of those regular stainless steel grinders for seven bucks, it’s gonna scorch the beans and give you an inconsistent grind and also it’ll kill ten puppies. Maybe eleven. It’s not math, it’s dark magic, so you just don’t know how many puppies will die because of your poor choice of grinder.

Boil the 20 oz. of water.

Take the Chemex and empty the water you put in there originally — you can just pour it out because the pour-groove isn’t covered by the filter. You think, “Oh, jeez, if I tip the pitcher, the filter’s gonna fall out,” except it won’t. Because of miracles. And probably science.

But mostly miracles.

Water should be boiling. Stop it from boiling.

Now: put your ground beans in the filter.

Once the water has cooled down a bit — say, 30 seconds after the boil — you want to pour just a little water over the grounds to wet them all. Enough to cover them. It’s like a wet t-shirt contest or waterboarding an enemy combatant NEITHER OF WHICH ARE GOOD OR ADMIRABLE THINGS so never mind forget I said any of that jeez just wet the coffee already.

You will notice now an effect called a “bloom.” A fungal spore pod will swell from the grounds and corkscrew its way up your nose and into your brain where it will pollinate your cerebral cortex —

*receives a note*

— I mean, the “bloom” is when the water saturates the grounds and they puff up a little before deflating again — which takes about 45 seconds or so. (I time every stage.)

Once that’s done, I begin a fairly assertive pour-over. I’ve actually taken to pressing a small dimple right into the center of the ground coffee — I start right in the center of that dimple and spiral out. Never touching the sides, because it seems like washing down the sides causes the whole thing to pack together and slow the brew. Center only. Fill about a 1/4-inch from the top. Let it drip down a little, then add more water (usually takes me three pours).

The extraction should be about 3-5 minutes.

Any less than that and it’ll taste sad and watery, like your tears.

Any longer than that and it’ll taste grim and bitter, like your dreams.

Now: pour.

Drink.

Exult.

Exalt.

ALLOW THE CAFFEINE TO GIVE YOU SUPERPOWERS.

Ahem.

The Asterisk

To be clear, I’m not actually mocking anybody’s use of K-Cups or drip makers or whatever-your-choice-of-coffee-num-nums. You follow your bliss to wherever your bliss takes you; to quote Kacey Musgraves, follow your arrow wherever it points.

How do you brew your coffee?

From where do you procure your beans?

What coffees you like?

LET US SPEAK ABOUT THIS MOST IMPORTANT OF SUBJECTS.

A Fancy Instructional Video!

This is a great video on brewing with your Chemex. Check it:

A CHEMEX BREW GUIDE from Cartel Coffee Lab on Vimeo.

I get it. You want to talk about that show you just watched.

The one where a major character died. Or someone got engaged. Or one person was unmasked as another person. Or an alien. Or a sentient washing machine.

And you are quite plainly free to discuss these events in whatever social media feed you possess. It’s your social media frequency channel and you can broadcast anything you want on that signal. You can tweet pictures of monkeys drinking their own urine. You can post Facebook updates about that genital rash that won’t clear up. It’s your digital yard. You can trim the hedges into whatever shape warms your heart and I can’t make you do different.

I can, however, choose to not walk by your yard.

I can unfriend you on Facebook. I can unfollow you on Twitter.

That’s more my responsibility than it is yours, I understand that.

Just the same —

I’d like to talk to you a little bit about spoilers not in an effort to beat you about the head and neck with my opinion but rather to at least try to get you to understand where I’m coming from. See, where I’m coming from is, spoilers kinda suck. They trouble me. They trouble me both as an audience member and as a storyteller myself.

A storyteller concocts a story in a certain way. Anybody who tells stories is familiar with this — you want to create a certain rise and fall of plot, you want to escalate tensions and then give some breathing room, and at a great many of the narrative peaks are tentpole moments. Moments of character that seriously complicate or compromise the plot. Characters dying. Secrets exposed. New steps taken. Old enemies reborn. And we orchestrate these moments almost like we’re writing music. We’re trying to build to various crescendos and not just make a cacophony.

The problem is, were you to isolate that singular moment of musical crescendo, it’s not particularly interesting. It’s just a blurt of noise, a sudden spike of sound.

Spoilers are kinda like that. When you extract these impactful narrative moments and isolate them — and then broadcast them — you’re really just transmitting a weird, context-free spike of sound. It’s not that the story is ruined, exactly, but you’ve robbed some of the potency from it. You’ve stolen urgency and thieved surprise. It’s not the same thing as announcing who won an Oscar or who lost the sportsball game — those are data points not dissimilar from noting the temperature outside or the color of the sky at noon. But when you grab these crucial narrative events and spoil them, you’re reducing them down to being just data points. SCOOBY DOO IS DEAD. DOCTOR WHO IS PREGNANT. BRUCE WILLIS WAS ACTUALLY THE STATUE OF LIBERTY FROM PLANET OF THE APES THE WHOLE TIME.

It’s like you just told a punchline without letting people hear the joke, first.

See, storytellers spend a lot of time trying to claw and climb to these narrative moments — and the audience spends a lot of time going along for the ride.

Spoilers short-circuit that. They rearrange how I experience narrative.

Which is cool, if that’s what I want as an audience member, and if that’s how the storyteller has designed the architecture. But if it’s just what you want, Mister Spoilertrousers, then you’ve gone ahead and forcibly changed my experience of the story. And that sucks a little bit.

And here’s where someone says, “You don’t like spoilers, stay off of social media.” And that sounds fair on first blush, but it doesn’t really change the fact that inconsiderate is still inconsiderate. You are likely broadcasting this stuff to a whole lot of people who aren’t yet aware of it. The Walking Dead — easily the most spoiled show, and one so spoiled for me now I’m not even sure I’m going to watch it anymore — airs later because of the time difference, but those who watched it on the East Coast feed were spoiling the shit out of it as the thing aired. It’s not like you’re asked to hold spoilers for weeks — but, you know, you might at least wait 24 hours till some folks have caught up? At least until people have watched it live?

I get it. You want to spoil it. And again: you’re allowed to. But that doesn’t make it particularly nice. And it’s not nice to say, well, just stay off Twitter, then. I’d rather you not blow cigarette smoke in my kid’s face or take a shit in the public pool, but nobody would ever say, YOU DON’T LIKE POOP, DON’T SWIM IN THE PUBLIC POOL, PAL.

It’s funny. The type of audience seems to have an impact on this. The audience for Breaking Bad seemed protective of spoilers — hell, they still are. But The Walking Dead or Doctor Who seems to draw far more spoilers without regard or consideration of those who maybe haven’t seen it. People seem to be more protective of spoiling the experience in films than they are television — and take even greater care with books. I know part of this comes down to the “second screen experience” that television seems so keen to push, but certainly you have ways to talk about the experience without spoiling it to a very large, potentially public audience? Google+ allows for limited broadcast. Or there exist forums or second-screen apps or direct messages or blogs or email or… you know, good old-fashioned “go watch the show with human beings and then talk about it over a slice of pie.” Hell, even a Facebook update with HOLY FUCK WE’RE GONNA TALK SPOILERS HERE AWOOGA AWOOGA at least tells me at least to stay away from the comments.

But spoilers come fast and furious. No warnings. Sometimes as graphical memes. Sometimes just as a single line: YOU GUYS I CAN’T BELIEVE THE DOCTOR JUST REGENERATED AS A PERSNICKETY POSSUM IN A BOWLER HAT AND A HOUNDSTOOTH JACKET.

The other thing is, I don’t know what the value proposition is for spoilers. It’s like, for the people who already watched the show — well, you announcing OMG PAPA SMURF GOT SHOT isn’t a surprise nor is it in any way insightful. You’re announcing something they already know. And for the people who didn’t watch it — well, now you just ruined it for them. What do spoilers earn you, exactly? What do you get out of it? Serious question.

I dunno.

Can you spoil stuff? Sure. Should you? Well, that’s on you. But I’d rather you didn’t. Just as I’d rather you not open my Christmas presents and tell me what’s in ’em before I get there. Just as none of us like those movie trailers that seem to give the whole movie away in two minutes and thirty seconds. Just as you’d probably rather not have me time travel to an hour before you watch a show so I can spoil it for you.

I won’t come to your house and tell you the endings of all your unread books.

And you don’t broadcast spoilers to people who haven’t yet caught up within a reasonable time.

Just try to think about the experiences of other people.

Deal?

***

(I know a lot of this is first-world problem bullshit. I know starving kids in third-world countries aren’t like, “Sure, I’d like some potable water and fresh food, but sure, I’ll listen to how you got spoiled on The Walking Dead last night first, because that sounds totally important, too.” So, you can take all this with a grain of salt. Just the same, as a storyteller with some skin in the game, I thought I’d talk about it. Feel free to toss thoughts in comments. Play nice.)

Christmas approacheth. A giant Santa Kaiju slouching toward Bethlehem.

And not just Christmas but a host of other holidays.

Which means it is time for various delicious confections:

Candies. Cookies. Pies. Sugar-fried elf meat.

I am a terrible baker-person, but just the same this is the one time of the year where I put on an apron and get out the mixer and do my damnedest to hang out with the family and make some goddamn motherfucking cookies and treats, so this is also the time when I come to you with wide, panicked eyes and I ask for your recipes of said cookies and treats.

What are your favorites?

Let’s go with “not too difficult to make.”

Suggestions and recipes appreciated.

*stares at you and seductively licks a candy cane*

Just a head’s up —

NaNoWriMo is a big ol’ cork-pop of “writing blather,” so I’m going to take December off.

I mean, I’ll still be here. Blogging as I do.

Just not about anything related to the art, craft, or practice of writing/storytelling/publishing. I reserve the right to change my mind if something particularly compelling comes up that DEMANDS MY INEXPERT OPINION, but otherwise, this is a solid ban.

I’ll still talk books and stuff because — hey, year’s almost over and I have favorite reads to detail.

Otherwise, it’ll be food and toddlers and coffee and a post I’ve been working on for quite some time now, which is about the very nature of happiness in our lives. It sounds all serious, but I’m sure I’ll still find a way to include unnecessary references to poop, genitals, unicorns, hobos, maybe badgers, possibly wombats. I gotta be me, after all.

So, there you go.

December:

The Month Of No Dubious Writing Bloggerel.

*bangs gavel*

*eats a cupcake*

Some quick notes:

First, today’s the last day to nab the NaNoWriMo bundle for $10.

Today is also SMALL BUSINESS SATURDAY, which sounds like a glorious excuse to go to your local indie bookstore and procure for yourself and your friends and your family and your foes and your pets one or several books. Perhaps even mine!

That said, if you cannot make it to a wonderfully wondrous indie bookstore on this day, I will make note that Amazon is running a 30% off of their books with the coupon BOOKDEAL, and B&N has the same with code BNFRIDAY30.

You will also note that the paperback version The Cormorant — aka the new Miriam Black book, which arrives in December — has been discounted on Amazon to $5.05, for reasons yet unknown. (It’s cheaper than the Kindle version, so.) If savings are your jam, Amazon has your bread.

Also, yesterday’s impromptu #TalesFromBlackFriday hashtag made some hay of the crazy day by turning it into absurdist dystopian horror — it started early and then by the end of the day had over 1000 tweets. I’m quite seriously considering editing a charity anthology for next year’s Black Friday. You can find a Storify compilation of many of yesterday’s madness. It was fun.

Finally, if you’re wondering what to get me for Christmas, I’d love a pony. A pony with whiskey in its many saddlebags. But, failing that, I’d love it if you reviewed one of my books at your Review Receptacle of Choice. Reviews are not only nice to have from an ego-standpoint (HEY PEOPLE READ MY BOOK WHEE) but also because they matter for the author in terms of the industry (as in, various entities within the publishing industry will look at reviews on books as being something at least slightly meaningful) — so, reviews (er, good reviews) help us keep doing what we do.

Thanks!