Apple-Obsessed Author Fella
The Book of Accidents is five bucks for your various E-MACHINE CYBERBOOK platforms. Why is this? I don’t know. How long will it last? I’ve zero idea. But it’s true right now, at the moment I type this, and you’ll find this to be the case at Amazon and Kobo and B&N and Apple and all that.
So, enter the old house, find your way through the boulder field, down to the old coal mine. Something waits you there. And it’s $4.99.
Stand fast root, bear well top
Pray the God send us a howling good crop.
Every twig, apples big.
Every bough, apples now.
— Apple Wassail song, 19th century Sussex
This is the apple in your hand.
Some would say it is so red that it looks black, but that’s not quite right. It’s the color of wine and offal, of liver soaked in Pinot Noir. Bruise-dark and blood-bright.
The skin shows little russeting, if any. But it is home to a peppering of lenticels—the little white dots you sometimes see on appleskin. These lenticels feel somehow deeper than the skin itself. As if you are staring into a thing that is nothing as much as it is something: an object of depth, of breadth, like a hole in the universe. In this way the lenticels are like the stars of a moonless evening.
The skin is smooth and cold, always cold. It is a round apple, not oblong, not tall, but also not squat. The Platonic ideal of an apple shape, perhaps: roughly symmetrical, broad in the shoulders, narrow toward the calyx. The apple is heavy, too. Dense-feeling. Heavy enough to crack a window. Or break a nose.
Even before you bite it, a scent rises to meet you. It’s the smell of roses—not unusual, because apples are related to the rose. Same family, in fact: Roseceae.
What is unusual is the moment, a moment so fast you will disregard it, where the smell makes you feel something in the space between your heart and your stomach: a feeling of giddiness and loss in equal measure. In that feeling is the dying of summer, the rise of fall, the coming of winter, and threaded throughout, a season of funerals and flowers left on a grave. But again, that moment is so fast, you cannot hold onto it. It is gone, like a dream upon waking.
Of course, what matters most is the eating.
In the first bite, the skin pops under your teeth—the same pop you’d feel biting into a tightly-skinned sausage. The flesh has a hard texture, and if you were to cut a slice you’d find it would not bend but rather, it would break like a chip of slate snapping in half. That snap is a satisfying sensation: a tiny tectonic reverberation felt all the way to the elbow.
In the chew, the apple is crisp, resistant to its destruction, with a crunch so pleasurable it lights up some long-hidden atavistic artifact in your brain, a part that eons ago took great joy from crushing small bones between your teeth. The flesh is juicy; it floods the mouth, refusing to be dammed by teeth or lips, inevitably dripping from your chin. But for all its juiciness, too, the tannins are high—and the apple feels like it’s wicking the moisture out of your mouth, as if it’s taking something from you even as you take from it.
The taste itself is a near-perfect balance of tartness and sweetness—that sour, tongue-scrubbing feel of a pineapple, but one that has first been run through a trench of warm honey. The skin, on the other hand, is quite bitter, but there’s something to that, too. The way it competes with the tart and the sweet. The way how the most popular perfumes are ones that contain unpleasant, foul odors secreted away: aromatics of rot, bile, rancid fat, bestial musk, an ancient, compelling foulness, from the faraway time when crunching those little bones made us so very happy. And so very powerful.
The bitterness of the skin is a necessary acrimony: a reminder that nothing good can last, that things die, that the light leaves us all eventually. That the light leaves the world. A hole in the universe.
It speaks to you, this bitterness.
It speaks to some part of you that likes it.
Because part of you does like it.
Doesn’t it?
***
And so, the cover for BLACK RIVER ORCHARD is revealed.
It comes out September 26th, 2023.
The cover was by Regina Flath, art director at Del Rey, she is bad-ass, and the cover is bad-ass, and I love it. (You can find her and follow her on Instagram here and on Twitter here.)
You can pre-order a copy here at PRH, or from these places: Doylestown Bookshop, Bookshop.org, Indiebound, B&N, Amazon, though as always, the best place to buy books is from your local bookstore. Booksellers are book wizards and you need to feed their magical hungers lest they turn on us all.
(I note too that it looks like B&N is doing a preorder sale. You get 25% off if you use the code PREORDER25.)
I’ll certainly talk more about the book as it gets closer to release. As for now, well. If you’d like to know what the book is about — I got you covered, friend.
Official description:
A small town is transformed by dark magic when seven strange trees begin bearing magical apples in this masterpiece of horror from the bestselling author of Wanderers and The Book of Accidents.
It’s autumn in the town of Harrow, but something else is changing in the town besides the season.
Because in that town there is an orchard, and in that orchard, seven most unusual trees. And from those trees grows a new sort of apple: Strange, beautiful, with skin so red it’s nearly black.
Take a bite of one of these apples and you will desire only to devour another. And another. You will become stronger. More vital. More yourself, you will believe. But then your appetite for the apples and their peculiar gifts will keep growing—and become darker.
This is what happens when the townsfolk discover the secret of the orchard. Soon it seems that everyone is consumed by an obsession with the magic of the apples… and what’s the harm, if it is making them all happier, more confident, more powerful?
And even if buried in the orchard is something else besides the seeds of this extraordinary tree: a bloody history whose roots reach back to the very origins of the town.
But now the leaves are falling. The days grow darker. It’s harvest time, and the town will soon reap what it has sown.
…
Anyway.
Hope you consider pre-ordering it.
Hope you consider spreading the word, too, while you’re at it.
Tell your friends. Tell your family.
Tell the trees, too.
Just kidding.
(The trees already know.)
OKAY BYE
That’s the news, hoopy froods — a reminder that my rescheduled B&N Easton/Bethlehem appearance is this very weekend.
I’ll be at B&N in what they call Bethlehem but I think is kinda sorta Easton — it’s this store right here.
I’ll be there at 1pm!
I’ll sign books!
I’ll talk!
I’ll dance!
I won’t dance!
It’ll be great!
That’s it, really, that’s the post — WANDERERS is on sale! $2.99 at your major e-book platforms. So if you haven’t checked it out, now’s yer chance. And if you have checked it out and care to spread the word, that’d be awfully nifty.
The links, if you need ’em:
Aaaand of course if you do check it out, especially at this oh-so-shiny price point, it would be utter aces of you to leave a review somewhere. A nice review. A pretty, precious review. *pets the review* *stares at you*
(Plus, if you read WANDERERS, then you have the sequel, WAYWARD, waiting for you. In the darkness. With a crowbar. I didn’t give it the crowbar. It just took it. I don’t make the rules. Just do what the book says.)
Let’s see, what else is going on? Anything? I finished the second draft of BLACK RIVER ORCHARD and sent it off, so that’s nice. Did I ever mention I was on THE DARK WORD, Philip Fracassi’s podcast about horror and horror writing? It was a blast and a half. A really great conversation. Go give a listen. And I was on Dead Headspace, which was also a hoot (with guest host Mercedes Yardley), and also on Ben Blacker’s podcast, The Writer’s Panel? I think I mentioned this stuff but the pandemic has chewed even more holes into my brain.
ANYWAY OKAY BYE
On this, the first ‘official’ morning of 2023 (meaning, a work morning), I read an article, as one does, at Bookseller: “AI narration is inevitable.”
Written by Mark Piesing, it argues that AI narration is already very good and will only improve, that it’s cheap-as-free, that human narration is not necessarily better, and so on and so forth. (It also begins with a paragraph suggesting the writer is stung because people praise the audiobook narration done for his own work, but do not instead praise the writing he did for said book, which is an awfully strange way to begin the opinion piece, as it strongly suggests a bulging mouthful of sour grapes as motivation. “These narrators are getting my credit!”)
Mmm yeah, no. Fuck all of that. Let’s talk about this a little bit.
(Excuse that it’s a bit of a ramble. Don’t like it, I’ll give you your money back.)
First, the implementation of any technology is not automagically inevitable. We need to stop treating it like just because a thing exists it is now as certain as the fucking sunrise. It was once “inevitable” that e-books were going to completely eradicate print books. Did that happen? It did not. Sometimes it goes the other way — it has been supposedly inevitable that high speed rail would take over the country and the world, and it has not. (Certainly not here in the US, anyway.)
You can, with enough confidence, assert that anything is inevitable, no matter how weird or how horrible. “Eventually, we’ll all have domesticated chimpanzees thanks to genetic engineering!” “It is futile to resist turning homeless people into cobblestone — we have the technology to make human bricks, and this solves the homeless problem and will be a green initiative!” “Its obvious that we have already destroyed the Earth and so we should just get used to living in one of Elon Musk’s Martian Exo-Colonies, even if the Prefabricated Smart Habitation Modules sometimes uproot themselves and roll themselves off into deep canyons, screaming racial epithets as they crush everyone inside!”
Just because artificial intelligence exists and works does not mean it is universally:
a) good b) necessary c) desirable.
Is it good? Not at this point. It’ll certainly get better, but in the space of narration it’ll absolute miss the vital subtleties that make human narration enticing. (Same goes with art and writing in general: the robots will never understand those little things, those little beats, the larger emotional throughline, and so forth.)
Is it necessary? I’d argue no. Cheap or free insulin is necessary. Health care is necessary. AI narration is… a frippery, really. I note here that AI audio narration for some things could certainly assist anyone with visual impairment, and to Piesing’s point this might be best with things like technical manuals or academic textbooks. But that’s also quite a bit different from, say, narrating a novel or a non-fiction book, and it’s quite a jump from one thing to the other.
Is it desirable? Not for me and, I hope, not for most others. This may feel like a leap, but in a time of pandemic (and figuring out life in the midst of pandemic), I think we’ve come around to the idea that it’s actually pretty nice to connect with other FLESHY MEATBAGS both online and especially in person. Humans may not be awesome en masse, but individually, they’re pretty fucking great, and to go back to the first point, I think humans in narration and art and writing form part of that connection we want to make. I don’t want to read the novel an ATM writes. I don’t want my car to paint my portrait. I want art and stories and the voices of actual BLOOD-FILLED THOUGHT-HAVING PERSONS.
Yes, as a technology as I expect AI will continue to inform our daily lives on the regular. It already is. We will surely find a broad degree of problem-solving being done by AI in hospital systems, in GPS, in coding, in engineering — sometimes this will be a good thing, sometimes (aka, more times than we’d like to admit) the AI will come with all the unseen biases and prejudices the designers and programmers accidentally (or purposefully) baked into it.
But consumer choice matters, as does the choice of those in power.
If you, the reader, the viewer, the listener, don’t want it — it doesn’t happen.
If the people in charge of making decisions don’t want it — which really only happens if they think there’s going to be blowback, enough to harm their reputation and bottom line — it doesn’t happen.
If the artists and writers and editors and narrators don’t want it to happen — well, that one gets stickier. Because all too often, we get steamrolled. But I think this is a place where we have some autonomy, too. I’m a writer, and I damn sure don’t want artificial intelligence writing my books, because then I’m out of a job. So it would be mighty hypocritical of me to suggest that I’m okay with someone using AI to design a book cover of mine, or to edit my books, or to narrate those stories. I can push back there, and this is me, doing that.
I will not have AI-generated book covers on my books.
I will not have AI narrators.
I do not want AI mucking about in my books at all, please and thank you.
Listen, I flirted with AI-generated images because it was nifty to ask a piece of software to design RON SWANSON AS A POKEMON or some goofy shit, but when you see that the digital sausage is being made from the art of real artists (SOYLENT DIFFUSION IS MADE OF PEOPLE), you start to flinch at the idea. I certainly did. I also recognize that narration and writing from AI aren’t necessarily pilfering “style” as directly as it seems it is with art — but dollars to donuts you’re going to start to see AI writing crib whole phrases or sentences from working writers, you’re going to see AI done “in the style of” an existing narrator or actor, you’re going to see humans turned into chum to feed the capitalist sharks, because that’s what this is. (And yes, I recognize we are all participating in a system of capitalism and it’d sure be lovely if we could all just have a Universal Basic Income and blah blah blah if we all lived our socialist art dreams where we created what we created because it gave us beauty and not because it gave us a paycheck. But I still live in the real world where my bank really wants me to pay my fucking mortgage. This isn’t revolution. It isn’t praxis. Artificial intelligence will just make rich people richer. It will not magically undo our system of chits-and-ducats, okay?)
Never mind the fact that cutting out audiobook narrators also cuts a lot of jobs; never mind the fact it only gives big company more power, not less, as either some publisher or maybe Amazon/Audible or even just some Elon Muskian tech bro charges you for the “privilege” of having a dead-voiced droid tell you the tale at hand, cutting out all the actual creators in the process.
Yes, I understand that the article’s author is suggesting this will broaden the exposure for indie writers and such — but those indie writers could hire indie narrators, or indie artists for their covers, or indie editors. Writing a book isn’t easy, and publishing one isn’t free. Even using AI, the cost is coming from somewhere. Somehow, that price is extracted. Better to ensure a fellow creator is seeing that benefit, isn’t it?
More to the point, audiobook narrators do an incredible job at layering the work of an author with the additional strata of their own human experience — it brings to the table their inflection, their attitude, their (to be redundant) humanity. Acting and narration aren’t just DOING THINGS and SAYING STUFF. Just like art isn’t FILLING IN LINES WITH COLOR and writing isn’t SENTENCE CONSTRUCTION. It takes human experience. And it feeds human experience.
Man, c’mon. Stories and art are human endeavors. They just are. We tell our stories and paint on the cave walls and sing our songs because we want to be heard, we want to tell you things that we’ve seen and that we feel, we want to feel less crazy and less alone, and we want to stitch our thread into the tapestry of human experience. We don’t want a shitty robot to do it for us. And I hope you don’t want that either.
EAT SHIT, ROBOTS.
WE DON’T WANT YOUR BEEPS AND BOOPS AND YOUR WHIRRING MURDER FINGERS BECAUSE WE ALL KNOW THAT’S YOUR ULTIMATE PLAN, TO JUICE US FOR OUR FLUIDS AND TURN US INTO SOFT BRICKS THAT DO NOT CORRODE OR DEGRADE YOUR HORRIBLE WHEELS OR CLICKING SPIDER LEGS
GOOD DAY, ROBOT
I SAID GOOD DAY
Anyway. Yeah.
As I have the aforementioned mortgage, I remind you that I’ve written some stories about artificial intelligence and particularly what it does when it gets a little bit over its skis, so to speak. So, if you haven’t checked out WANDERERS and its sequel, WAYWARD, well, I’d sure love it if you did so, and yelled about it to all your friends and family and pets.
(P.S. — someone here is going to call me a Luddite. And here I ask you to read up on the Luddites. “They protested against manufacturers who used machines in what they called ‘a fraudulent and deceitful manner’ to get around standard labour practices…. Mill and factory owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the movement was suppressed with legal and military force, which included execution…”)
(If you’d care to read last year’s 2022 resolution — here ’tis.)
This year’s resolution is simple on the surface, if difficult to implement:
Be vigorous in your defense of your work.
Now, already I want to be clear that I don’t mean “defend it against bad reviews” or “against healthy criticism” or “editors” or whatever.
So, let’s unpack what I do mean.
As a writer, everyone wants a piece of you. They treat the act of writing as an unserious endeavor, failing to see it as the result of the three corners of art, craft and work. It’s something anyone can do, they think. You’re replaceable. None of this matters. And so on. But writing does matter, we know. Writing goes into everything. Writing is bricklaying — it holds up the world. The stories built from the written word can change the world, too. Maybe not the whole world, but often, one person’s world. And that ain’t nothing.
But I don’t know that everyone… agrees with that? Or understands that? And I think there’s a very real threat against writers that comes from all directions. People want your time. They want to take your place. You are the singular summation of your experiences and have stories to tell, but sometimes people want you to tell a different story — one better designed to sell books or one that is simply someone else’s story that they want to put in your mouth. And this is definitely the year where I feel like I’m hearing from a lot of writers who are feeling somewhat beaten down by all of it — by others’ estimation of writers, by the industry, by the doom of Twitter, by just the pandemic in general. They feel taken advantage of, in some cases. They feel whittled to splinters.
So, I think this is a good year to dig in your heels a little.
It’s a good year to ensure that you take the time to write when you need to take that time. And also to carve out a place — a literal place! — for yourself to write, be it a room, a desk, a kitchen table, a shed, whatever, wherever.
It’s a good year to worry less about killing your darlings and instead start to learn what hills you’re willing to die on.
It’s a good year to think about what you want out of this career — what matters most to you, what stories you want to tell, you must tell — and to seek out those desires as if you deserve them. (Because, spoiler warning, you do.)
It’s a good year to make sure you’re not sacrificing things to anyone (publisher, family members, whoever) just to further their needs and not the needs of you, your stories, your career. Don’t let them ding your future. You deserve to get paid. You deserve your rights. You deserve to have your voice heard.
It’s a good year to make sure we stop believing that writing and storytelling is just some precious privilege and you’re so lucky to be doing it that you should be willing to give everything up just to be allowed to stay near to it.
It’s a good year to understand your power and to hold onto it.
To express it when you can, or when you must.
Again, this is not an exhortation against criticism or review or editorial oversight. It is not to say your story is so good it must be published and damn anyone who doesn’t listen. This is not to say you are a perfect being with perfect stories. This is also not a refusal to compromise. Compromise is vital. Writing, even when it’s just you, is a collaborative act in a sense, and there will be compromises that must must must be made to improve the work at hand.
Rather, this is all a reminder that you do this thing because you love it, because you have stories to tell. And it’s a reminder that people will try to take a little of your magic away for themselves — and that this can come from people in your life, it can come from big licensed intellectual property machines, it can come from publishers, it can come from whoever and whenever, and it’s important to know when it’s time to say no, when it’s time to say I deserve better, when it’s time to demand respect in service to your art, your craft, your work. In a sense, this is sometimes about good relationships — and you’ll know when you’re in one because they’re going to join you in this defense of the work. That could mean a spouse, an editor, an agent, whoever. They can still challenge you, but that challenge is about bringing the best version of yourself and your stories to bear — it’s not about taking something away, not about reducing you, but sharpening the knife that’s already in your hand. Some people want to brighten your light. Others just wanna throw a blanket on it.
Stand tall for yourself and your work. And stand tall for others who need that defense, too. (For instance, keep up with the Harper-Collins strike here. Support them when you can, because a healthy bookish ecosystem is good for everyone. Look too to how Brandon Sanderson talks about Audible and how that affects authors.) Stand tall for your writing, for the writing of others, for the good of your own support systems inside the publishing machine.
We only get one good turn on this carousel, so make it count.
I hope your 2023 is a good one, a productive one, and one where you make a stand for the stories you want to tell.
I selfishly remind I have a new writing book out this year —
I mean c’mon it has a BIRD flying out of someone’s HEADCAGE.
Preorder from Doylestown Bookshop and I can sign and personalize, if so desired. Comes out June 6th, 2023.
Have a great year. See you in the word mines.
