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.

Effects Vary: Amazon

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!

Uhhh, what else?

Oh!

Wayward made the list of Most Anticipated Horror for the rest of 2022.

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.

I think that’s it!

More as I have it!

OKAY YOU CAN GO HOME NOW

Hey! You asked if I was going out into the world on book tour for Wayward? Why yes, I am, to these places right here:

For those who can’t see the graphic:

11/12, 3pm: Doylestown Bookshop, Doylestown, PA

11/15, 7pm: Eagle Eye Bookshop, Atlanta, GA, with Delilah S. Dawson

11/16, 6pm: Malaprops, Asheville, NC

11/17, 7pm, Queens University, Charlotte, NC (yes, open to public!)

11/19, 2pm, Fountain Bookstore, Richmond, VA

11/20, 2pm, B&N, Alexandria, VA (Potomac Yards, I think it’s called?)

And then there are two additional dates in December —

12/4, 3pm, Let’s Play Books, Emmaus, PA talking to Bo Koltnow of WFMZ, takes place at Nowhere Coffee Co – South Mountain.

12/10, 1pm, B&N Bethlehem (which is actually in Easton, PA?)

So! There you have it! The Doylestown event is a pre-release — they will have the book, so no worries there.

Q&A —

Where can you get signed, personalized copies?

Well, any of these should be able to furnish that if you’re coming to the event. As for if they’ll ship to you, I suspect you can through Eagle Eye, Malaprops, Fountain, Let’s Play. I can also guarantee that Doylestown Bookshop will, because they’re my local store and I’m going there on 11/10 to sign the books that they’re sending out! Link here, just put in the notes you want it signed/personalized, and how. Or call them to order.

Who is doing the book sales for the Queens University event?

Park Road Books!

Why aren’t you coming to my town specifically?!

BECAUSE I HATE YOU okay wait no that’s not it.

So! I don’t set this tour up. My publisher does. And in that setup they contact bookstores, find out what stores are interested, what stores think they can run the event and run it well, where I have readers and where I can make new readers and so on and so forth. Then they do calculus based on how I can get to each of these easily. The tour is in November, where weather might start getting hinky in parts of the country. And air travel is janky as fuck right now. Here, the goal was to manage a tour that was predominantly driving. And doing a Southern tour in this case made sense — the weather should be better, I haven’t done a tour down there before, and there are a number of stores I’ve wanted to get to (Fountain and Malaprops in particular!). And it’s configured in a way to maximize that first week of visits.

All of this is predicated too on the worry that book events aren’t all the way “back,” so to speak, in the not-quite-post-pandemic-but-we’re-pretending-it’s-post-pandemic era. It’s not that they’re not happening, but they do seem erratic. (Which is why it’s important if you can show up, if possible! Support stores! Support events! Bring me candy and whiskey I mean what!)

If your town isn’t listed, I apologize, I might get there in the future. Unless you’re a jerk. Then I will never come to your town ever! Ha ha ha! Jerk!

Not really, I love you all.

Are these events masked?

Well, it’s not required, I don’t think.

But! It’d also be nice? As in, I’d very much like you to mask. Me. I’m asking. I do not know if the bookstores will ask — but my goal is to be unmasked during the talks so you can hear me and such. I am BIVALENT BOOSTED and such, but given that I’m going to be Out On The Road, if COVID pings me and I rock a positive test… it will fuck up the tour, most likely, and I have no idea what I’ll even do. Further, that means the events will be more comfortable for immunocompromised readers and will also be safer for the staff —

So, y’know, maybe don’t give me COVID! Please mask? It’d be cool of you.

Do I have to buy a book to… show up?

Generally, that’s the idea, and I think some of these make it a requirement of the event, but you need to check with the store first.

Can I bring books I didn’t buy there?

Sure, just… y’know, support the bookstore to by buying books there also!

Will you sign a baby / body part / Satanic pact?

I’ll sign anything you care to put in front of me.

What will you… do at this so-called “book signing?”

Well, I’ll sign books, but also, I’ll give a little talk, I’ll do a little dance*, I’ll do a big-ass Q&A (so bring your QUERIES). We’ll also all perform a sinister ritual together and it’ll be great for TikTok.

In cases where I have a conversation partner, it’s like, the same, mostly. We’ll talk. We’ll answer questions. Sinister ritual, blah blah, etc.

*no dances

OK THAT’S IT

COME TO MY EVENTS

OR I’LL REMEMBER HOW YOU SPURNED ME

YOUR NAME WILL GO ON A LIST

A LIST INKED ON ANCIENT PARCHMENT

THE CURSE WILL BE WRIT

DO NOT INVOKE THE CURSE

also hey Wayward’s out 11/15, so that’s cool

byeeeee

Kalyna’s family has the Gift: the ability to see the future. For generations, they traveled the four kingdoms of the Tetrarchia selling their services as soothsayers. Every child of their family is born with this Gift—everyone except Kalyna.

So far, Kalyna has used informants and trickery to falsify prophecies for coin, scrounging together a living for her deteriorating father and cruel grandmother. But Kalyna’s reputation for prophecy precedes her, and poverty turns to danger when she is pressed into service by the spymaster to Rotfelsen.

Kalyna is to use her “Gift” to uncover threats against Rotfelsen’s king, her family held hostage to ensure her good behavior. But politics are devious; the king’s enemies abound, and Kalyna’s skills for investigation and deception are tested to the limit. Worse, the conspiracy she uncovers points to a larger threat, not only to Rotfelsen but to the Tetrarchia itself. 

Kalyna is determined to protect her family and newfound friends, but as she is drawn deeper into palace intrigue, she can no longer tell if her manipulations are helping prevent the Tetrarchia’s destruction—or if her lies will bring about its prophesized downfall.

That the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Existed

U.S. public schools aren’t known for their historical accuracy or thoroughness, so I was around 30 when I read Henryk Sienkiewicz’s classic historical novel With Fire and Sword (the Kuniczak translation) and learned that, for a few hundred years, there was a country called the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was, as you might guess from the name, a combination of Poland and Lithuania into one state, but it was also a lot more than that.

The Commonwealth was huge, and sandwiched between some of the most aggressive empires of its era, yet it wasn’t despotic or centralized at all. It was almost, sort of, kind of, maybe a democracy, if you squinted. The king, who would rule both Poland and Lithuania, was elected. Elected by the nobles, specifically, who were certainly evil tyrants that owned serfs, but it was still a wildly different method of government than anything else in the world at the time. This London Review of Books article from a few months ago does a great job of showing just how wild and chaotic that election process was.

Without learning about the Commonwealth, I doubt I would have ever come up with the Tetrarchia[ES1] , the four-in-one country where Soothsayer takes place. Like its real life inspiration, the Tetrarchia is an experiment, unlike anything that’s come before it, mashing together existing ethnic and social groups into one lumpy hodgepodge of a nation.

Just How Long a Debut Can Take to Be Out in the World

I wrote a version of the opening scene of Soothsayer in late 2012. I think I finished the first draft in early 2014. I spent 2015 on revisions, and then on querying agents. Querying many, many, many agents. Hannah Bowman was interested, but the manuscript needed more work, so I did even more revisions and sent it back to her. She still passed.

Then it was the end of 2016 and for some reason I was very depressed and unable to write for two years.

In 2018 I got back in touch with Hannah, regarding a different project, and she became my agent. This was amazing: the closest I’d yet come to being published. Cue more revisions on Soothsayer, but now with Hannah’s notes. She did some merciless (and entirely correct) cutting, and also suggested a whole new character and subplot that improved the book’s plot and thematic cohesion immensely.

In 2020, Hannah sent it to editors. Sarah Guan at Erewhon bought it. More revisions. Sometimes, Sarah would have a note asking what I meant by a certain phrase or idea, and I would have to respond: “I don’t know! I wrote that eight years ago. Let’s cut it!”

There’s a strange, out-of-body experience to reading something you wrote when you were an entirely different organism. Sometimes it provides delightful surprises; sometimes it’s deeply cringey. But, when there’s a decade’s worth of revisions piling up on the page, you mostly get a disconcerting palimpsest that exposes a hundred different people you used to be, or almost were.

That I Like Writing First Drafts by Hand

I used to be the sort of person who’d spend all day on a paragraph, endlessly tweaking and rearranging. Unable to move forward until it was perfect. (I learned, less than a year ago, that this was actually ADHD, but that’s a whole other story.)

As a workaround, I began writing my first drafts by hand. Moment to moment, longhand writing is much slower than typing (and I used to do transcription as a full-time job), but it forced me to blunder forward, bad phrases be damned. A pen and paper not only helped me get the book done faster, but allowed me to access parts of my brain that were hampered by the ability to fine-tune every word forever.

Also, you can bring a paper notebook to cafés and bars that have “NO LAPTOPS” signs, and you never lose a day’s work because goddamn motherfucking Microsoft OneNote doesn’t sync.

That I’m Bisexual

When I began the book (again, a decade ago), I made my main character bisexual because I thought, “Obviously being bisexual is just the best: everyone knows that. I wish I was bi! It’s too bad I’m definitely straight.”

To be clear: if you ever see me in person, you will immediately know that I’m not straight.

Writing how Kalyna, my sort-of hero, reacted to people that she found attractive unlocked something in me. But it wasn’t the book’s queer attractions (of which there are plenty) that taught me about myself, it was the straight ones: when she admired handsome and pretty men.

This forced me think: What makes an AMAB person attractive? What attraction in them can I latch onto to make Kalyna’s internal monologue feel believable? And, most importantly, why is the friendly curmudgeon who’s just in charge of the royal palace’s fruit so very hot?

That There Really Were Medieval Weapon Treatises for Sickles

When she absolutely must fight, Kalyna does so with a sickle. In the back matter of the book, I wrote that there really were sickle-fighting treatises, but that I could no longer find where I’d learned that. Well, in writing this piece, I found where!

Paulus Hector Mair, a fencing master in 16^th century Augsberg, wrote a combat treatise on a number of different weapons, one of which was a small, simple farmer’s sickle. Yes, there are pictures. It’s good to know, so many years later, that I didn’t just make up the stances that Kalyna uses.

Sickle-fighting appealed to me immediately because it’s rarely seen in fiction; because it forces  the reader to imagine particularly ghastly and uneven wounds; and because, being a farm implement, it’s inherently proletarian. (Although I’ll admit the book was long finished when a friend pointed out the obvious communist iconography. Oh well. I’ll take it.)

***

Elijah Kinch Spector is a writer, dandy, and rootless cosmopolitan from the Bay Area who now lives in Brooklyn. 

Elijah Kinch Spector: Website

Kalyna the Soothsayer: Bookshop | Amazon | B&N

So, I got a nice comment at this very blog a week or so ago, from visitor Delon O’Donnell, and I was going to answer with a comment but thought, y’know, this could be worth a post all its precious own.

Delon’s comment:

A potentially annoying aside: I really miss your blog posts on writing.

I guess writing those was part of your process in the past when you were moving towards your current level of skill, and now it’s not that necessary for you to consciously think about such things? Or maybe the traumatic hectic-ness of the past bunch of years have made it hard to get into the free-wheeling sort of mindset in which you wrote those posts? Or writing three books at once makes idly noodling away at a zero-profit-generating blog post flat-out untenable? Look at me processing here. I just know I got a lot out of those posts, including a kind of ongoing emotional support and humorous brightening of days through the writing process, and I don’t think there’s anybody else out there writing for writers the way you can.

Not that any of that is a reason for you to continue to do so. You do you and go be a superstar bestselling author. I have nothing but gratitude for all the benefit I’ve derived from the good things you’ve given us. Thanks a squillion, Chuck. ^_^

And Delon is right. I don’t really do many posts about writing anymore when once upon a time, that was probably at least half the content you’d find on this here WEB LOG. These days, ennh, not so much. And why is that, exactly?

Well, it is, as Delon notes, due to a handful of reasons and not just one.

First and foremost is, I don’t post here as often. I’d like to, though it’s a bit harder to get traction with BLOGPOSTS these days — I think we should return to that time, as it allows for more nuanced takes than you get on, say, Twitter, where nuance goes to not only die, but be incinerated in the fires of a thousand hot takes. But also, at a certain point, I need to write books, not blog posts. And those come first because it is for them I sacrifice other writers to the Old Apple Tree in the woods uhh, I mean, it’s books that pay my mortgage.

Second, I know very little about writing. In fact, the longer I go as a writer, the less I actually know about it. What I do becomes more mysterious, not less. Which is, all in all, not a bad thing, really, strange as it may sound — I think it’s good to find that my relationship to WORDS and STORIES has evolved to a point of sheer who-the-fuck-knowsery. All is permitted, everything works, nothing is forbidden, as long as what you do is good and necessary, and what’s “good and necessary” is a set of teleporting bullseyes. So, life is short, go write. That’s not to say I don’t still have opinions and thoughts on things — I do, as after all, I am a WHITE MAN IN AMERICA, of course I have opinions. I just know they don’t matter that much and I also don’t want anyone to take my opinions to be gospel.

Which leads me to —

Third, some people take or took my writing advice far too seriously. And that’s in both directions. I’ve had some folks really treat it like gospel, as if they should be following my “instructions” to the letter (even though I like to think I never framed them as instructions). I’ve also had years of “fisking” and YouTube “takedowns” of my “bad advice,” as if I’m out on the street in the village of writers, tooting my hypnotic panpipes, leading all the moon-eyed authors toward the river with my songs of bad advice, where I promptly drown them in the current. (Now I want artwork of me flute-tooting other writers to their watery graves.) I’ve always tried to write my advice in a way that was super-not-serious while also staple-gunning a thousand caveats up about how writing advice is bullshit (but bullshit can still fertilize). But some people were really hidebound to address the advice as if I’m inking a new bible instead of just barfing into the void with half-digested opinions. I certainly don’t want to be a leading voice in this. As Delon hints at, talking about writing was, for me, quite selfish. It was me yelling at me about things that were bothering me — the fact anybody ever listened or gleaned value from it shocked me from the get-go. So, I became a little more gun-shy about stomping around with my Big Writer Boots, telling people how to Write Their Words, even though that’s not what I intended to do.

I never want my writing advice to be taken too seriously. Even the act of writing itself shouldn’t be taken too seriously. You climb way far up your ass and you’ll never find your way back out.

That being said, I’m also not entirely shutting the fuck up. If there’s something pertinent, it might come up here. Furthermore, I have a new shiny writing book coming out in… don’t quote me on this, but I think June 2023, called Gentle Writing Advice. It’s a book that in many ways grapples with the very idea of writing advice, and attempts to counter a lot of the more aggressive writing advice out there (which is advice I’ve given!), particularly in this time of area-of-effect trauma and ambient turmoil.

ANYWAY.

So there you go! An answer. Maybe a satisfying one, maybe not.

Best advice I’m gonna give you is, go write. Write a little, write a lot, write when you’re able, but not when you’re not, and just try to find a time and a place to call your own and to make the words happen.