Vakov Fukasawa used to be a Reaper: an elite soldier fighting for Harmony, against a brutal invading empire. Harmony made him elite by injecting him, and thousands of other Reapers, with the DNA of an extinct alien race, altering his body chemistry to make him addicted to adrenaline and aggression, making him stronger, faster, and more aggressive and more powerful. And it worked. At a cost. Because alongside their supersoldiers, Harmony created an illicit drug market that left millions hopelessly addicted to stormtech.

Disgusted and disillusioned, Vakov walked away when the war was over.

Only, Harmony never took their eye of him. He may want nothing to do with them, but when his former Reaper colleagues start being taken out, Vakov is horrified to discover his estranged brother is the prime murder suspect, and has to investigate. Even though the closer he comes to the truth, the more addicted to stormtech he becomes.

WRITE WHAT YOU’RE PASSIONATE ABOUT

Sure, you can write what you know. That’s easy. It’s also methodical. Clinical. I wrote that way up until STORMBLOOD, where I decided that I was going to cram the pages with as much cool and wacky and absurd stuff as I could.

I decided to write what I was passionate about.

A character-driven, first-person space opera? Pierce Brown did it, so can I. Seedy alien drug dealers and smugglers? Sure. An entire asteroid, filled with hundreds of cities stacked on top of cities like the floors of a building, each with their own style, class and visual aesthetic? Go for it. A protagonist who wears a full suit of armour pretty much everywhere he goes?  Sounds great. Space cults? Why the hell not? AIs that create avatars that look like animals they’re fond of? Who says I can’t?

In the past, I sometimes felt inclined to gravitate towards the common genre tropes. The done things. The things successful people were writing about. With STORMBLOOD, I decided to screw the rules. I was going to write exactly what I wanted to write. I wanted to write a voice-driven, first-person protagonist who literally gets high on the alien DNA pumping through his body. I wanted to make it intense, delightfully weird, in your face, and a little bit gross. I wanted this book to ooze passion and craziness. I wanted this book to be me.

And it worked.

WRITE FROM THE HEART, NOT THE BRAIN

I was a plot-driven guy. For a while, at least. When I started creating the character of Vakov Fukasawa, I was more interested in his story. Rather than letting the plot dictate the course of events, I let his emotional state drive the narrative. How trauma has turned him into someone filled with rage.  How his childhood, and his relationship with his brother, his Reaper colleagues, has shaped his personality. Why loyalty and family and brotherhood mean so much to him. And how much it truly hurts to see the damage being done to them.

I wrote about these themes because they matter to me. I gave Vakov Fukasawa these values, these emotional soft points, but they’re my values. When I wrote about the pain, the loss, the heart-break, and the determination to do better, to do right by the people you love, I wanted them to come from a place of truth, from the heart. Not just from him, but from me. I wanted to believe what I was writing. When I went for the gut and for the throat, I wanted it to mean something.

I learned that, at the end of the day, I want my writing to touch the heart of anyone who reads it.

DON’T BE AFRAID TO GO THERE

I’ve always liked fiction that was confronting, unexpected. That got you sitting up straight, lighting shooting through your veins, and a knot tightening in your stomach.

But doing that means taking a risk, and I don’t think I was brave enough to take it. Looking back, some of my fiction was a little passive. Inoffensive. But as STORMBLOOD started to take shape, I wondered how far I could go. If I was prepared to take risks with my characters and world-building. If I could really weird it up.

So I did. Given that the protagonist has an alien organism sniffing inside his body, there’s no lack of mentions about sweat prickling his back, his body hairs going stiff, or the alien DNA slithering down his ribs. What it’s like to really get high on an adrenaline rush, to feel an alien organism cranking your senses up to eleven in all its maddening and sticky glory (as well as the very messy after-effects). I threw my protagonist into terrifying, dread-filled situations, either where truly horrible things are done to him, or he’s forced to do horrible things to survive. Wasn’t sure if I had the skill to do justice to those scenes. If I wanted to damage my character in this way. If writing a protagonist who did and said these things would make him unlikeable. But I learned it’s necessary to push myself, to step out of my comfort zone and see if I could cook up a smorgasbord of insanity that really got the reader wondering what the hell they just read.

I won’t lie; I had a lot of stuff cooking up bizarre things to include that went the extra mile. Gothic Victorian space stations. Spaceships designed like cathedrals. Insane AIs used in interrogation that look like monsters. Suits of armour that like being worn. Drug dealers who have fused their DNA into the walls, turning entire rooms to an extension of their own body. Aliens who sell their own keratin and spinal fluid.

Go big or go home.

THE DARKER THE STORY, THE MORE IMPORTANT HOPE IS

STORMBLOOD is about war, trauma, domestic violence, drug abuse, human exploitation, and suffering on a galaxy-wide scale. Characters are not treated kindly. As the themes started to take shape, I knew if I screwed this up, this could be a relentlessly bleak ride. But soon, I saw the way to balance the scales. By developing relationships between the characters.

There’s some dark moments, to be sure. Characters get put right through the ringer and back. But I learned never to slip into nihilism or wallowing. The characters always had to be there to support each other, to have each other’s back no matter what. There had to be moments of peace and quiet. Where characters get to talk about their passions or relate a happy memory. Even when a very real threat was hanging in the air, Vakov and his best friend Grim had to have banter, little moments of comradeship and empathy (like having a drinking game and getting smashed in an alien bar. I’d fill a whole book of those, if I could). And when things got really dark, I learned to have moments where the characters reminded themselves who they were fighting for. Why their friends and family mattered so much to them, and why they’d let that hope, that love, give them courage to do the impossible. That darkness makes the light of hope that much stronger, and having characters be apart of that hope gave my narrative a human subtext.

VOICE IS EVERYTHING

I’m a sucker for loving descriptions of tech. I write space opera, so obviously world-building is on the table. And we already know how important character is to me. I went to great lengths with my previous projects to make every paragraph sing off the page.

But it wasn’t until I was editing STORMBLOOD that it hit home what I’d been doing wrong. None of that mattered unless it was infused with a strong voice. And by voice, I mean the protagonist’s voice. I want every word of these books to be filtered, coloured, and tainted by my protagonist’s mind. Sure, that’s a great description of a spaceship, but what does this spaceship mean to him? What’s the emotion, the history? It’s about how he sees things, the way he’d describe them with his dark and morbid sense of humour. More than that: I realised the prose, the sentence structure, needed to reflect his personality, as if he was speaking aloud. That meant going back and downgrading some of the language, making the narration more conversational, more terse and in your face. I chopped out any flowery phrases or pretty adjectives, made the language more visceral and gutsy.

That meant undoing many, many hours of work. That meant having a turn of phrase that’s rough around the edges. But I learned that, more than anything else, it was worth it. The book feels more organic, more raw than anything else I’ve written, because every sentence is drenched to the bone with the character’s voice. Hell, it even smells like him.

So if you don’t like it, blame him, not me.

***

Jeremy Szal was born in 1995 in the outback of Australia and raised by wild dingos. He is the author of many short stories and the space opera novel, STORMBLOOD, which was published by Gollancz in 2020 as the first of a trilogy. 

Jeremy Szal: Website | Twitter

Stormblood: Amazon | Authors Website

Have you ever wanted to write a novel? How about twenty-two of them? Do you like being told no hundreds of times for a living? Great, me too!

What a rubbish sales pitch that would be.

I used to talk about writing a lot. For a while, I literally blogged every day. A lot of that was about writing. About writing books, trying to find an agent for those books, writing about other people’s advice about writing books, and eventually about signing contracts for books I wrote. And then everything went to hell, and I slipped back into the bushes like that Homer Simpson GIF.

I’ve tried to write this post about five times and have scrapped about two thousand words of it. I am leading with that, because it feels relevant.

I even hyperbolically labeled the document “attempt a billion” because I feel like I have been staring at it since the Cretaceous Period.

I’ve hit some strange milestones this year in my writing career, and while I had a lot to say about it, I didn’t know how to say it. So instead, I’m going to give it a go in five chunks. Five things I’ve learned, five wheels you shouldn’t have to reinvent, five lessons, five shouts into the windy void.

This Isn’t Over

Maybe it’s weird to start out by saying something isn’t over, but I feel like it’s worth hammering into place with very large nails.

There was a not-insignificant amount of time where I believed my publishing career was dead before it had even begun. For those of you who don’t know me, my debut was put up for sale in a box set with three other authors’ books, released as a solo just in time to get orphaned, and removed from sale within six months of publication. Without going too in-depth into the other exciting points of that sob story (three orphaned books and an untenable contract and Agent Hunt the Third within three months of each other), when your debut barely sells three hundred copies, let’s just say acquisitions teams are not so keen on taking a risk on your next one.

From that point on, I spent a couple years self-publishing to a decent amount of success with my Ayala Storme series. But I had always wanted to sell traditionally, and it increasingly looked like it wasn’t going to happen.

My books started failing—and I do mean failing. The Storme sales dried up, partly because I took a sharp turn genre-wise, none of my novels was selling in the traditional world, and I was floundering.

But I held onto one thing. I told myself that everything I was doing was fertiliser. That I was sowing seeds in the earth below my feet, and that if I kept tending them, maybe they would grow.

I wrote new categories and subgenres. I started freelancing as an editor. I read craft books and style guides and kept writing new things. I tried short stories for the first time. I started a Patreon. I learned Gaelic to fluency. I started singing again. A brand new publisher decided to acquire my backlist and my shelved epic fantasy, and I decided to go for it.

It wasn’t over then, and it isn’t over now.

Seeds Take A While to Sprout

In 2018, one of my musical heroes disappeared and was found later, having died by suicide. I wanted to write something to honour Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison, to process his death and the connections I’d had to his music and his mental illnesses—his words resonated with many people who shared his depression. But nothing I wrote seemed right.

Then, after a week-long Gaelic immersion course at Ceòlas in South Uist, something clicked. I came home and wrote “Seonag and the Sea-wolves” in pretty much one sitting and fired it off to Jen Gunnels at Tor who also reads for Tor.com. She bought the story within a month, with me writing as M. Evan MacGriogair. It ended up making the Hugo longlist and has been reprinted now twice, with a third contracted.

In 2017, I’d written a YA. It came close to selling many times, but it didn’t. Like many of my novels, it seemed promising when it went on sub only to fizzle out after a year or so, I suspect because according to BookScan, I’m a big, juicy trombone womp on the loss side of “profit and loss.” This was the twelfth or thirteenth novel-length work I’d written. We were about to shelve it when my former agent got in contact, as she was acquiring YA after a spell of only doing younger categories.

In 2019, I sold that YA as Maya MacGregor. It comes out next year from Astra Books for Young Readers, and it’s called THE MANY HALF-LIVED LIVES OF SAM SYLVESTER. My acquiring editor told me over a plate of chimichangas that when she’d brought the book to the team, they’d asked her how the hell I hadn’t been snapped up yet. I may have cried into my margarita.

And as a final example, way back in 2016 (remember when we thought that year was the Worst? Bless), I had the absolutely, lolsob-worthy timing of releasing a book about a city slipping into the pit of fascism the very week the US elected Trump. It wasn’t a coincidence that I wrote that book—my degree is in history, and a big part of that was spent studying the reemerging extremist cells in Europe and the US. But despite its painful topicality, the book sank. Hard.

A few weeks ago, that book—which I am writing this post to promote—earned me my first ever starred review for its new hardcover edition. Five years after it “failed.”

Publishing is a Luck Game

I think we can all recognise that publishing is far from a meritocracy. It doesn’t diminish the power or impact of wonderful work to say that getting a book on a shelf is a concoction of timing, the nebulous markets, what an editor just bought, whether an editor is vibing with something in particular, and a million other factors.

You can write an amazing book and not sell it. You can write a book people hate and sell millions of copies. (Not here for bashing Twilight—like it or not, Meyer did something very right.) You can yeet a book onto Amazon and do absolutely nothing and have it somehow sell a thousand copies in its first few weeks and then go on to sell almost twenty thousand more. You can pour your soul into a book and have it sink like a lead-covered stone dropped over the Mariana Trench.

There is relatively little in our control, and before I get a pitchfork to the gut, “little” is not nothing. It’s just possible to do everything “right” and not have a breakthrough book. But that also means that sometimes, just sometimes, lightning strikes.

Publishing is a Long Con

As I went through Point Two on this list, you probably can already guess the gist of this one, because they’re closely related.

It’s one thing to look back in hindsight and say wow, all those things I did five years ago ended up doing stuff! But it’s even more powerful to look around right now and say that what you’re doing today could bear fruit in five years.

One of the things I’ve been mulling over in the past couple years is the difference between recognition and intentionality. I can recognise good writing when I see it but not be aware of the techniques and specific devices used and how I can also utilise them in my own writing. The same is true for general effort—it’s easy to get into autopilot mode and forget that we have agency and that our agency can alter future outcomes.

t(w + c) = l

No, I’m not saying that luck is the product of Terribleminds and Chuck Wendig, but it would be handy if it did. (And just in case, Chuck, may I have your blessing?) [edit — YOU MAY — cw]

At the end of all this, the most important lesson I’ve learned has to do with those letters standing for different variables where t=time spent, w=work, c=craft, and l=luck.

Am I mathematician? No.

Is this any more scientific than saying luck is the product of Chuck Wendig and Terribleminds? Also no.

But it is something that helps me feel a little bit more in control when so many things are outside my control.

I cannot control geopolitics and global pandemics. I cannot control whether the editor who’s had my novel on their desk for nine months will happen to pick it up on a day they ate some bad charcuterie and can’t focus because they need to run to the loo every ten minutes. I can’t control markets, reviewers, who else publishes the day my book comes out, or even (very frequently on the trad side of publishing) my covers and titles.

But I can control other things. I control the effort I put into my craft. I’ve now written twenty-two novels, and by the time you read this, it might be twenty-three. LOOK TO THE SUN was my tenth.

I can control whether I keep going or take a break, whether I give up altogether or come running back to the game. I am responsible for whatever ends up on my pages.

And if there’s anything you learn after seeing a few rounds of the “ten year overnight success” in this business, it really is that luck is very frequently the product of work and craft over time. It’s not as simple as that, of course, but you have a much better chance of getting struck by lightning if you are in the plains of Kansas in tornado season than on a sunny day in a redwood forest. Don’t go get struck by lightning, but do work smart and sow your seeds in fertile ground.

Not all of us luck into the easier (note I didn’t say easy) route of writing one book, getting one agent, getting one book deal, and then getting successive book deals forever from there that allow us to live comfortably on our writing income until we retire. Most of us don’t, overwhelmingly. I certainly didn’t. Maybe I never will.

If you’re like me—the me of five years ago or the me of now—wondering if it’s worth it, I can’t answer that for you. I frequently avoid talking about my publishing experience because no one really wants to hear “on top of the gruelling process of writing one (1) book and finding one (1) agent, you might have to do it multiple times and might end up writing a fifteen books before getting one advance,” but I can tell you that it isn’t over until you decide it is.

(My stubbornness comes in handy sometimes.)

I can’t say what’s going to happen next. LOOK TO THE SUN’s grand re-opening might coincide with any number of catastrophes. Murder hornet-sharknado, who knows? What I can say is that none of us at all have that kind of predictive power, and whatever happens could be terrible! But it could also be something wonderful.

I’m a writer because I have a very active imagination. If you’re also a writer, it’s likely because you do too. I know how easy it is to imagine the worst possible outcomes or to imagine that the troubles of the past will also be the troubles of our future. So my challenge to myself and also to you is to apply that imagination to exploring new futures. New ideas, new good things, new solutions to old problems. Good things can still happen, even in the godforsaken hellscape of 2021.

I believe that for me, and I believe that for you too.

We’ve got this.

***

Emmie Mears is the author of over fifteen novels for adults and young adults, also writing as M. Evan MacGriogair, Maya MacGregor, and Sylvie Greenhart. Their English short fiction has appeared on Tor.com and in Uncanny Magazine, and their Gaelic poetry and short fiction is in the Poet’s Republic and in Steall magazine. As a Gaelic singer, they have won awards as both a solo singer and as part of the Alba choir and the Glasgow Gaelic Musical Association. They live in Glasgow, Scotland with their two cats and dreams gu leòr.

Emmie Mears: Website | Twitter

Look to the Sun: BHC Press

In this stunning debut by actor and screenwriter Ryan O’Nan (Skins, Marvel’s Legion, Queen of the South), time itself can be wound back like a clock. The power of Winding can fix mistakes and prevent disasters. Or, in the wrong hands, it can be used as a weapon against the world…

Juniper Trask is a prodigy, raised under the Council’s strict Code, which allows Winders to exist in secret among average humans. After the shocking murder of her mentor, she is chosen to take his seat on the Council. But as Juniper settles into her new role, cracks of dissension are forming around her, and she uncovers the dark truth behind their power. Juniper has just become a pawn in a game no one knows is being played, and as she begins to question the Code for the first time, her life spirals into a world of danger.

Charlie Ryan always knew he was different, ever since he saved his mother from a horrible car wreck that no one but him remembers. After meeting a mysterious man who claims he has the same ability, Charlie leaves home to chase him for answers. But the world Charlie’s stepped into is more dangerous than he could have imagined. Charlie’s powers are special, and there are those who would kill to get their hands on him.

Now, Juniper and Charlie need each other if they are going to survive the future—no matter which future that may be…

TIME TRAVEL RULES ARE HARD AS HELL

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure made time travel rules look easy. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar made them feel hard (for me at least). So, as I ventured into the swamp of time travel world building, I prepped myself for some struggle. But truthfully, the world building of the rules in Winders was one of my favorite parts. I love new rules in sci-fi. Rian Johnson’s Looper had a rule about people only being able to time travel in one direction through time, which shaped his story in a really fun way. As I approached my rules for Winders, I knew a couple of things. I knew I wanted the people in the story to wield this ability like Jedis somehow, and I also knew it wasn’t going to be actual time travel. The example I use is: If you cut your arm and you time traveled back one minute, you would still have the cut—it would just be a minute earlier. But with winding, if you cut your arm a minute ago, and then you wound back time a minute, the cut would go away. It would have been erased. Ok, so kinda time travel, kinda not. Definitely time travel adjacent.

But how could I make it like Jedis? The answer that changed everything for me came with three rules: 1. A stronger Winder can block the wind of a weaker one—unless the stronger Winder is distracted or too tired.  2. If two Winders are touching, then they wind together, and both perceive it happening together in real time. 3. Winding makes a sound. A sound which other Winders can hear, but normal humans can’t. Winders can tell if a wind has happened close by them, but if they’re focused, they can tell when a wind is just starting to happen, which gives them the chance to block it—if they can. And with those rules in place, let the jousting begin.

I WISH I HAD THIS POWER SO BADLY

For some, people and opportunities just seem to come to them, as if by gravitational force; while I’ve always felt myself balancing on a knife’s edge, trying desperately to make correct choices, fighting to say the right thing at the right time to the right people.

Call it trauma from moving around so much as a kid and constantly entering new schools and new social circles (or trying to). Whatever. Here’s the thing: the people we tell ourselves we are when we’re young never really leave us, I think. I’ve always felt like an imposter. In my life, I’ve been a skateboarder, I’ve toured around in an indie rock band, I’ve been an actor, a screenwriter and even a director, and never have I lost that feeling that I’m on a tight rope and one wrong move will send me spiraling down to my doom.

The power that Charlie and Juniper and the rest of the Winders have in this novel makes me incredibly jealous. There are so many advantages someone with this ability would have. An extra minute of knowledge of how stocks or international currencies will shift could lead to endless wealth. If a basketball player knew exactly what pattern the defense would form every time they had the ball… If a candidate in a presidential debate knew exactly what their opponent would say right before they said it… Or if you had endless chances to say all the right things to the girl, or boy, of your dreams…

Hell, I’d be using this ability on a regular basis to pick which lane of traffic I’m in. Every time I pick a lane, it seems like all other lanes start moving faster than the one I’m in. But maybe the traffic Gods are even more powerful than winding, and no matter what lane I picked, it would still be the slowest. Which leads me to the next thing I learned…

MAYBE I AM A CONSPIRACY THEORIST

I don’t like to think that the world and all of us sloshing around in it are being manipulated on a constant basis from unseen force, BUUUUTTT, isn’t that the nature of all power? To eventually control? To play God. There IS a reason that the Zuckerberg’s don’t let their kids participate in any kind of social media. There’s a reason why, when I have a private conversation with my friend about the incredible month I spent in Dubrovnik, Croatia a decade ago, suddenly I start getting sent ads on my phone for Croatia vacations. And that’s just a little dorky example. That’s not the multi-national corporations asserting their influence on countries across the globe, all for the sake of power and money. The time winding is the fiction; the world spanning puppet strings are very real. I think.

I LIKE TO KILL MOMS

My mother called me when she read the first line of Winders, which is: “My mother died twice.” She wanted to know why I always kill the moms in my stories. This is true. But I didn’t even realize it until she asked. I kill a lot of moms in my stories. I tried to examine it, and I this is what I eventually concluded… growing up without my mom sounds like scariest thing I can imagine. I grew up in a pretty damn chaotic childhood. Multiple factors involved. But there was a ton of criminal shit going on, and because of this, my family moved around like crazy. Not state to state, but from a nice home at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac to living in tents on the beach, and shitty motels, for years at a time. I’m the oldest of five kids, and when I was young, we ran like wolves. Very little supervision. But it forced us to be self-reliant, and to make our own games, and to get creative in order to have fun. But there were also scary times.  Danger and poverty are kissing cousins after all. Big danger in the world my father was involved in, and little danger in the rough areas I lived in at times. But through all of that, I had my mom. My mom was not perfect. She had her own demons. Definitely dealt with substance abuse issues, for which she’s been in recovery now for decades. But she was an amazing mom. She poured love into me and my siblings. And that made us braver. It made us feel safer—that there was a safety net for us when we failed. The scariest thing I could imagine was losing my mom at a time when I needed er most. I’m not sure me and my siblings would have survived what we went through without her. So, I suppose, because of that, my kneejerk reaction to the idea of making my characters less safe, and making their worlds more frightening, is to pull the net: kill the mom. So, both Charlie and Juniper are momless. Sorry, moms!!!

“LET ME PLAY THE LION, TOO”

There’s this part of me that has always wanted to be and play everything. Like the character of Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” I’ve always wanted to play the lover, and the tyrant, and the lion. Everything. “I will roar, that I will do any man’s heart good to hear me”. He’s the fool in this play, because obviously you can’t do everything. But the beautiful thing about writing—that I learned specifically with this novel—is that you actually get to do that. While writing Winders, I got to be Charlie, the troubled young man fresh out of a military prison and yearning to reconnect with life; and I got to be Juniper, a young woman scientist warrior, whose life gets completely uprooted when she suddenly discovers that everything she knows to be true is different than she believed. And I also got to be the psychotic villain, Trevor, bent on world domination, still reeling from a brutally violent childhood and making the world pay for it. And I even briefly got to slide into the skin of Grams, an old woman who raised two orphaned boys who were in desperate need of the love she poured into them. I got to be all of them for a small amount of time; and in the end, they all have little pieces of me sewn into each of them on an elemental level. The good, the bad and the ugly. All of it. I’ve always been so grateful to writing for being a medium in which you get to take the very best part of yourself and the very worst part—the apotheosis of your personal experiences and the most brutal and humiliating moments in your life—and temper all of that into something to offer up to the world. I loved writing this novel. Whether or not anyone likes it (which I really hope they do) the story has given me a ton of joy, and that has meant the world to me.

***

Ryan O’Nan is an award-winning screenwriter, actor and director. He has written on such series as Marvel’s Legion on FX, as well as the edgy teenage drama Skins, Queen of the South on USA, and Wu-Tang: An American Saga on Hulu. Currently, Ryan writes and produces on Big Sky on ABC. On the film side, he wrote/directed the hit indie film Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best, which was released theatrically by Adam Yauch’s (Beastie Boys) company Oscilloscope Laboratories, where it received several awards. Ryan has been featured in both Filmmaker Magazine and Creative Screenwriting Magazine. As an actor, Ryan is best known for playing King George on the series Queen of the South. Ryan lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife and three cats: Bosco Beanbag, Fantine the Bean, and Amelia Wolfman. Winders is Ryan’s debut novel.

Ryan O’Nan: Twitter

Winders: Indiebound | Bookshop | Amazon

A deafblind writer and professor explores how the misrepresentation of disability in books, movies, and TV harms both the disabled community and everyone else.

As a deafblind woman with partial vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Elsa Sjunneson lives at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing and deafness—much to the confusion of the world around her. While she cannot see well enough to operate without a guide dog or cane, she can see enough to know when someone is reacting to the visible signs of her blindness and can hear when they’re whispering behind her back. And she certainly knows how wrong our one-size-fits-all definitions of disability can be.

As a media studies professor, she’s also seen the full range of blind and deaf portrayals on film, and here she deconstructs their impact, following common tropes through horror, romance, and everything in between. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history of the deafblind experience, Being Seen explores how our cultural concept of disability is more myth than fact, and the damage it does to us all.

[this book is essential and instructive! — cw]

***

I have always known that I was occupying a space that is considered impossible. The collective imagination of what is possible in a non-disabled society is narrow, and I live in unimagined space.

Here, I’ll give you an example:

There are no books about blind women for kids that aren’t about Helen Keller. Okay, there’s one. But it’s about a blind mom. 

When I met my partner’s kids for the first time, I wanted to bring them a book to explain a little about why my eye is the way it is. Why I use a cane. Why I wear hearing aids. There was nothing in the bookstore for me to bring them. No gift that would ease my entry into their world. 

At my local bookstore a few months later, I mentioned that I hadn’t found anything – and that my experience of kids books had been somewhat challenging. They all had small font. They weren’t written for non-sighted people to read. 

These things belied an absence in the imagination of publishers, a space dominated by the non-disabled  – but that’s only one place. The fact is there are blank spaces where disabled people should be everywhere you care to look. 

When I was writing Being Seen, I was looking at the spaces where blind people and Deaf people were. Where we were being misrepresented, where our stories were being told poorly. I was deliberately exposing myself to the many bad choices that writers, filmmakers and artists have made when they have displayed disabled bodies on the page, stage and screen. 

But it is the absence that I want to talk about now. 

It isn’t just that there aren’t children’s books about blind people. It’s that there aren’t children’s books being printed for the blind people in their lives to read to them. 

It isn’t just that as a kid I was the only Deafblind student in my classroom or school – it’s that there was an absence of other kids like me at all. 

Non-disabled society doesn’t want to see us. It wants us to go away. The way that we are told this is through the lack of presence that I experience in my day to day life. 

It is the absence of disabled women that is killing us. Absence in teaching professions, in medical professions, in leadership roles. Absence in stories that matter to us. Absence in representation.

The blanked out space where we should be is horrifying.

This is one of the carryovers of the era of institutionalization. In 1985 my parents were told to give me over to one, and to have another child. Would I be writing Being Seen if I had been placed in one of those places? No. I would be yet another blank spot in the world that should have been.

Being Seen is not merely about what blind and Deaf women are depicted as – who the world assumes we are as disabled women. It is about how the absence of us in the world’s imagination is killing us – it is a symptom of the sickness that our society has:  ableism. 

Being Seen isn’t just a book. It’s not only a piece of text that you can read. It’s an ask. 

I’m asking every non-disabled person who reads it to take stock of what they believe about blindness and Deafness. I’m asking every sighted disabled person to dismantle their own misunderstandings. 

I am hoping that this book helps me be better seen by the world that I live in. 

***

Elsa Sjunneson is a Deafblind author and editor living in Seattle, Washington. Her fiction and nonfiction writing has been praised as “eloquence and activism in lockstep” and has been published in dozens of venues around the world. She has been a Hugo Award finalist seven times, and has won Hugo, Aurora, and BFA awards for her editorial work. When she isn’t writing, Sjunneson works to dismantle structural ableism and rebuild community support for disabled people everywhere.

Elsa Sjunneson: Website | Twitter

Being Seen: Indiebound | Bookshop.org | Amazon

The inevitable Dune post has arrived.

I mean, c’mon, you knew it was coming.

We will just get out of the way right now my review: I loved it. I did not expect to love it. I adore Villeneuve’s work pretty universally, not a bad note in that fella’s song so far, but I have a lot of squirrelly feelings about Dune. They’re not particularly complicated or controversial, these thoughts, they’re just a loose tangle of snarls and burrs that make me generally disinterested in it. To try to name the three legs of this stool: first, I read the book in high school and found it to be fine, and, like a lot of weighty sci-fi, firmly up its own ass; second, I really love the David Lynch version for maybe no good reason except I love Lynch and it’s such a weird and brave adaptation for its time (even if Lynch’s vision was itself compromised); third, as a writer of genre fiction and reader of it and as a friend to many genre writers, I’m always like, hey there are other books, you can make other books, you don’t need to keep hacking away at this one, JFC.

Any doubts I had were dashed against the rocks. I watched the film at home, which rankles some cinema purists*, but I have a pretty TV with surround sound that makes my living room better than most theatrical experiences (barring, say, IMAX), with the bonus that I can pause the movie to get up to go pee (sorry, I mean, “refill my stillsuit”). And I was held rapt by it. I watched it a second time last night, this time with my 10-year-old, and to my surprise, he seemed to like it, too (with the exception of him reaching the end and being like, “wait what where’s the next part” and I said, “I think in about two, three years” whereupon he made a face like he’d just eaten a cat turd).

It’s rare I want to rewatch a movie so quickly, if at all. This felt like a seven-course meal and a strange dream in equal parts, and I wanted to keep going back to it, to experience new tastes and to try to decipher little bits, savoring this bite, pondering over another. It’s not a happy movie. It’s a tragedy. And the film wisely doesn’t divert away from the fact that the prophecy of this desert Messiah is one that is propped up, invented, seeded by the Inscrutable Witch-Nuns. I also really enjoyed that for what is traditionally to me a very cold, speculative story, Villeneuve and the actors went the extra distance to make me feel the humanity of some of these characters. Not overmuch, not so that it feels ham-fisted, but there is I think a habit of getting so lost in the weeds of the political maneuvering and prophetic machinations that you can very easily lose the people in that equation. (Though I also could’ve used a little more here. I enjoy that the Emperor’s jealousy is kept far from us, like a shadow threatening to overtake the light — but I really wanted more character from the Baron, whose hatred of Duke Leto feels so intensely personal but has no expressed reason to be. His character in the film ends up being mostly just Wow What A Bad Guy, which isn’t quite enough.)

As usual, I also like to pick apart a thing, at least a little bit, to try to understand what went into the architecture and articulation of a particular story. If not necessary to provide a “lesson,” then to consider how other creators choose to organize and design narrative. Choices are made in the telling of a tale, and I like to try to understand those choices. Both as a “firmly up my own ass” thought exercise and also to see if there’s anything to help me sharpen how I tell my own stories. Right? Right.

Here, I think the big takeaway for me — though surely there are more to come — is in how the film hands its worldbuilding. Dune as a storyworld has a lot of it — the story of this first book is one that sits atop a rather prodigious history of its own galaxy, and one with a lot of fiddly, crunchy bits on which the story seemingly relies. It’s actually so crunchy and obtuse I’m not even sure I entirely understood it —

Up until now. Until this movie.

Which is a helluva thing, really.

I really, really love its approach to worldbuilding, which seems to match with what my own desires for worldbuilding happen to be. In capsule, I’d describe the approach as this:

When the worldbuilding is inessential to the movement of the story, it discards it.

When the worldbuilding is essential to it, it folds it into the experiences of the characters.

It does not promote worldbuilding as the story’s priority. It demotes it to being only support.

(Which, in my mind, is what worldbuilding is there to do, lest your story become an RPG manual.)

Most importantly, Villeneuve trusts the audience.

To unpack this a little more —

There can be a habit in some movies or books to tell some of the background worldbuilding in a display of grand exposition — a voiceover, an encyclopedic chapter, a speech by a character Haughtily Explaining Things In A History Lesson. The story becomes a temporarily mouthpiece for Exposition Delivery. Now, the writing advice of Show Don’t Tell is well-meaning but not universally applicable, because sometimes it’s far more direct and empathetic to the audience to just tell them a thing rather than go through the shadow puppet play in order to demonstrate it. Just the same, it can also be true that Capital-T Telling can become very boring, very quickly. Nobody wants a story to be a lecture, even if that lecture is just trying to teach a class about its own history, culture, science, food, religion, what-have-you. This is especially true in film, where you need to be particularly judicious with your time. A minute of movie can be $100k or more in cost.

In Dune, Villeneuve is glad mostly to expect that the characters of this world know what’s happening, and to just move through it, and past it. (Contrast this with the godawful worldbuilding exposition found in a movie I otherwise quite like, The Force Awakens. The C3P0 “As you know, Bob, er, I mean, BB8” scene is so jarringly bad, as are any scenes where Leia explains to Han things that Han obviously definitely knows already.)

I’m spoiling a bit here (though it’s also difficult to spoil a story that has been around for over 50 years in a variety of iterations), so close your eyes now if you don’t want any spoilers at all —

But in the early scene where Duke Leto receives the Imperial Decree or whatever-the-fuck-it-is, we don’t need a lot of data. Simply by pushing forward into that scene without waiting for you to catch up, we swiftly learn there’s an Emperor, he spent a lot of money to send his envoy here, Leto’s signet ring is important in asserting his authority, and this is a moment of great significance for the Atreides family (one they hope is ascendant but that is ultimately tragic). We get a very brief glimpse of a Bene Gesserit witch but we really don’t know who all the Daft Punk motherfuckers are who are hanging out there, and it doesn’t really matter. I mean, it matters if you view story as a collection of details and data, but if you care about the broad human strokes of it, it really doesn’t add up to anything useful except trivia. (That said, there are those readers and genre fans for whom it is the trivia that matters most, and these tend to be the readers and watchers that care most about the notion of “canon.”) Villeneuve trusts you, the audience, to gather the context clues and to move on.

When context clues aren’t enough, the worldbuilding is delivered in merciless, in-narrative experiences. When it’s time to know what a Stillsuit is, the narrative is allowed do double-duty in the story — it’s about the suit being fitted to the Duke and to Paul, and in that we get a host of vital narrative bits: we meet Liet Kynes; we see how fiercely protective Gurney is over Leto; we see that Paul is able to intuit things about Fremen life and culture, and also that Kynes recognizes it and is aware of the prophecy. It’s a lot of juiciness while simultaneously telling us what a Stillsuit is. Later, we learn of a “sand compactor,” and Villeneuve doesn’t stop to explain it — he’s just like, “Fuck you, it is what is says it is, and you’ll see it later, it’s fine.” Then he just… ushers you past it.

It’s a good approach, because it doesn’t bog you down in details, and it makes sure that the focus of the story is on what matters most in the story: the characters. They’re why we’re here — we’re not here for the internecine grappling of empires and fiefdoms. We’re here for the people inside that internecine struggle, because without them, the story just becomes another bad high school history lesson where they fail to focus on why individuals matter and instead demand you simply know the dates of their kingly or presidential reigns, as if that’s all that really matters.

It’s wonderful. I like it.

Not to mention, it’s a beautiful movie. Truly.

I may have more thoughts on it at some point, but for now —

I HAVE COMMITTED BLOGGERY.

*presses big fat chonky ring into blob of wax*

*signet ring image is a screaming possum*

HOUSE WENDIG IS TRIUMPHANT.

Now buy my books (Book of Accidents, Dust & Grim) or I die in the desert of obscurity.

BYE

* okay to unpack “cinema purists” a little, there has, particularly with Dune, been this attitude that somehow seeing a movie in a movie theater is How You Must See Filmses, which of course utterly disregards the fact that the life-span of a movie is at best 5-10% of its total experience, and the rest of it will be on televisions and tablet screens and, I dunno, eventually on the control panel of your SmartFridge or some shit. It’s also ableist and pretentious and is a weird attitude to shove in people’s faces during a fucking global pandemic, AH YES THE ONLY WAY TO SEE A MOVIE IS TO GO OUT AMONG THE UNWASHED LUNG-HORKING MASSES AND ENJOY THEIR RESPIRATORY MIASMA, WHICH WILL BE THRUMMED INTO YOUR BRONCHIAL TUBES, FOR NO MASK IS A DEFENSE AGAINST THE MIGHT OF DOLBY ATMOS. Plus in this day and age people have 4k tablets and 8k TVs and room-filling surround sound or killer headphones. Shit, some of my favorite movies I watched on crappy CRT televisions in the 80s and 90s. It’s fine. If you like watching movies in theaters, do so! Huzzah and hooray. Just don’t judge me for not wanting to go to one of our local shitbox theaters where someone will bring a screaming baby and another person will be texting the whole time in front of me and a third jerk will be dully kneeing my chair every 47 seconds.