In the last, ohh, six or seven years, I think I’ve done a number of versions of this post — I don’t do it to be redundant, or to try to re-farm the same idea for clicks, because the clicks don’t get me anything. I do it mostly because it keeps happening, because the world grows darker and stranger, and I think, quite honestly, that makes it really hard to Make Stuff. And given that this is my job, and also my joy (and mayhaps it is your joy and/or your job, as well), it feels notable to continue to remind myself how the hell to do this thing in the midst of all this area-of-effect trauma. Because I suspect that anybody with one iota of empathy and a few braincells banging together will likely feel caught in a miasma of anxiety and depression, either bearing the brunt of it and smashing themselves like a soup can in a car crusher, or they’re disassociating so heavily that they feel disconnected from everything that makes them want to write stories or make stuff in the first place.

It’s just hard and weird to make stuff, to write stories, right now.

I mean, it is for me. Maybe it’s not for you. No writer is the same, and some will disassociate themselves right into the writing, and hey, fuck it, whatever works.

But for me it can be tough. And I say that as a very, very privileged person. (Yadda yadda, cisgender straight white dude who has a reasonable successful career in writing, etc. etc.) So I can only imagine what it’s like for the rest of y’all.

So for me, I need to occasionally revisit the work, and more to the point, revisit the reason for the work in order to recharge myself. And I don’t think there’s one reason to urge yourself to write and tell stories, whether that’s in a troubled time or in a time of ease and languor; we all write for a panoply of reasons, some very simple (“I like to do it”) to the complex (“I grew up in an abusive household and as such am almost troublingly sensitive to other people’s moods and behaviors, to the point it helps me put that in fiction and contextualize and control what is essentially complex PTSD”). And multiple reasons can be true at a single time. I write horror because I like it, because I like being scared, I like scaring other people, I enjoy the grotesquerie of it, and also it serves as a most excellent place for me to summon the demons of my anxiety and make them fight (and/or kiss) in a narrative arena of my own design, thank you very much.

I think right now, at this moment in time in troubled history, there’s value too — if, let’s say, you’re having trouble getting yourself to sit in front of the story — in viewing your fiction as a box. It is perhaps a blood-soaked shoebox, or a gilded clockwork box, or a box of keys, a box of teeth, a box of gold, a box of bone, but this box is like a reverse Pandora’s Box. Instead of opening it to let All The Evil out, you’re opening it in order to put stuff inside of it. I think there’s value, at least for me, in viewing my fiction as a receptacle for whatever I’m feeling at the time — both in terms of generic emotions and also specific ones. If I’m angry at something, a story is a place to put that anger. It can be a place to put it, not to be rid of it, but to store it. But it can also be a place to put it in order to explore it, to unpack it, to rewire it. And the same can be true for sorrow, or worry, or joy.

And readers may find what you put there useful in the same, or almost the same, way. They too have things to unpack and unravel and examine. And sometimes they just don’t want to feel alone. The story is a signal to them, an echo they hear that reminds them that they are not the only ones feeling this way. Not to suggest stories are, or need to be, an echo chamber; stories can and certainly should challenge the way we feel, and change the way we think. Storytelling, like all things, can be both. Our work can affirm feelings and they can break feelings and it can do this simultaneously, because stories are not one thing. They are broken mirrors in the author’s funhouse.

Obviously, this is essentially catharsis — it’s not a new idea, the notion that we can use art as a purgative, though here I’m not necessarily suggesting that art be the thing that absolves the feeling or rids us of it, but instead I’m saying that the art can make it useful. Because if you’re like me, a lot of you are sitting around feeling like a Point-Toward-Enemy Landmine ready to pop from the lightest pressure, like a little leaf falling on the wind and landing upon you. Boom.

But maybe all these fucked-up feelings can be of use.

Maybe there’s a place for them.

Maybe they’re decoration.

Maybe they’re tools.

Maybe they’re complex machines, I have no idea. Only you can know that.

As such, maybe right now your writing needs to be a corkboard for all the fucked-up things you’re feeling. That’s okay. If it gets you to the page, then do it. The opposite can be true, obviously: writing can be an escape. And if it is, open that door, that portal, and jump on through and get away from *gestures broadly* all this fucking bullshit.

To echo what I’ve said before, it’s okay if you’re not okay.

Hell, it’s normal if you’re not okay. Normal if you feel abnormal. Feeling broken when things are broken is a natural, understandable, even admirable thing.

And if your writing is a box where you can put all your broken feelings, then do so. It won’t fix the world. It won’t even necessarily make you feel better. But it might feel right, and righteous, and at the very least it’s a place to put all the shards and shattered bits of you for now until you can figure out how to put them all back together later on.

It’s up to you.

Failing all of that, you can always write out of spite.

Spite has never failed me — I have written many words fueled by the churning engine of spite. So much spite! So many targets of spite.

Do whatever gets you to the page.

Open the box.

Put whatever parts of yourself need to go in there.

And find the story that lives in that place.

Be well, frandos.

Let’s just get this out of the way now: this is not going to be a helpful post, it’s not going to be a hopeful post, and it’s not going to be a post with solutions. It will instead be an angry, incredulous thing. It exists here not because I want to bridge the chasm or fix what’s broken — though I do, obviously — but rather, it exists here as an artifact of rage and frustration.

I understand now in a true way the line from Yeats’ “Second Coming” —

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

are full of passionate intensity.

The fall of Roe this past Friday, butchering the rights of women and all who can get pregnant, is the first domino to fall in a line of horrors — LGBT marriage, LGBT existence, access to contraception, and despite what so-called “Justice” Thomas might think, interracial marriage, too. It is an unprecedented assault on bodily autonomy and sexual freedom. And the thing is, it’s only the first domino to fall in this particular line of dominoes. Other dominoes are cascading in competing directions, the clackity-clack of tiles falling in terminus lines that undercut the separation of church and state, that dismantle any attempts to keep guns out of the hands of people who want to massacre children, that attack at the very core the notion that we are a nation who can protect its people and regulate its industries and secure for them the freedom to live in a nation that actually gives at least a portion of a shit about them. You wanna fix climate change? Ha ha, fuck you, no way. SCOTUS seems hellbent to dismantle the entire regulatory state, except of course when it comes to regulating uteruses or marriages. Corporations get to be people, but people get to be cattle, and a conservative party purportedly about personal freedom and states’ rights reveals itself to care nothing about either of those things.

I don’t think people have fully reckoned with the notion that this is not merely an attack on democracy — it is the culmination of that attack, an attack that has been ongoing for decades. It is not the beginning of such awfulness — it is a late stage of it, likely to be the entry point into a new phase of atrocities. This is the walking ghost phase of our democracy: we have sustained a likely lethal dose of radiation, but we just haven’t figured it out yet. We are walking around, oblivious, unaware that a grave cancer inside has already killed us.

Consider: if we live in a country where we vote for leaders and those leaders help to pass laws and help codify and entrenched settled norms, and yet those laws and norms can be dismantled by an entrenched body of nine evil wizards, a majority of whom were installed by presidents who did not receive the popular vote (three such judges having been installed by one president who is a likely-illegitimate, twice-impeached coup-doer traitor!)… then what kind of democracy do you think we actually have? Do you think it’s a functional one? A healthy one? Do you even think it exists in a way that goes beyond lip service?

And all that’s after you already consider how absolutely fraught and frail our democracy has been for years. Gore vs. Bush? Gerrymandering? The sustained winnowing of the Voter Rights Act of 1965? Black and other marginalized voters stripped from the voter rolls, ballot boxes removed, polling stations stolen away? Democracy was already in pretty fucked-up shape before we got to this point, and arguably, is exactly how we got to this point.

So you might wonder: why the fuck am I angry at the Democrats about this?

Republicans are the great evil here, you’ll say. And I don’t disagree. There are no “good” Republicans. You can’t belong to a party who is tacitly for a panoply of horrors like forced birth and condemnation of LGBT individuals and so forth while still maintaining that you’re one of the good ones — because if you don’t believe in those things, you’re in the wrong fucking party. They’re the enemy. They’re the ones holding the knife stuck in our gut, smiling as we bleed.

The Democrats, ohh, yeah, they’re the ones watching.

They’re standing back, watching the knife go in and out, watching the blade saw back and forth, and oh sure, they make a lot of noises — gasps, whimpers, murmurs of dissent — and sometimes they reach out, arms fruitlessly pawing at the air. But they don’t step forward. They don’t throw a punch. They don’t get in the way. Instead, they tell us, if we want the knife to stop before it reaches our spine, gosh, we better show up in November. We better answer those fundraising emails and texts. “Did you get my email?” they ask as we wail and gush, as blood spatters on the floor and forms a pond around our shoes. “Did you hear the poem I read on TV? Did you see us sing God Bless America in front of the court? We can’t do it without you, see you in November.” And the knife works deeper as the Republican leers, all shining teeth, all wide and wild eyes.

The best lack all conviction.

The worst, full of passionate intensity.

Here, someone will say, well, what are they supposed to do? Manchin and Sinema! Filibuster! They only have so much power! But these are excuses. I’m not asking them to win every fight, but I am asking them to fight those fights. After all, they told us to vote, and we came out, and we did vote. We gave them the presidency and we gave them Congress, and yes, I recognize the nuance, the reality, that politics is hard, that it’s a fucking shitshow, that their majority is something of a hollow one, that getting anything done in this environment will require them to move mountains. But they don’t even seem to want to try to move those mountains, to engage with the act of saving our country no matter how difficult it may be. Nobody’s even picking up a shovel. They’re barely moving for a spoon to move a little earth. We tell them, expand the courts, kill the filibuster, put the legislation forward, make them vote, call them to task. But we get a lot of shrugging and feet scraping on the concrete and gee-shucks-but-Manchin, aw-gosh-but-Sinema, we would if we could —

Then they get on TV and they try to make nice with Manchin, or Biden says something about how honorable McConnell is, or Pelosi talks about how Republicans are good actually and we just need more of those good ones, and then it’s another fundraising email, another plea for November. But there’s no fight. The messaging is soft, calculated, strategic in a way you have to say with a sour face and vigorously rolled eyes. There’s no strategy. Nobody is throwing Manchin under the tires, but they fucking should. Nobody is calling McConnell a turtle-necked traitor to democracy, even though damn well he is. The climate is failing, bodily autonomy is gone, freedoms are peeling away like yellow leaves off a sick summer tree, but none of them seem particularly mad about it. Where’s the urgency? Where’s the fight? Get out your fucking knives. Spar! Stab back! This is literally existential. Our democracy is dying on the branch. Our environment is under such threat that our very ability to live in it is becoming uncertain. What the fuck will it take to get you to get as mad as we are? To be at the head of our rage instead of way behind it?

And here someone say, well, if we had just voted for Hillary Clinton, we wouldn’t be here, and you know what, maybe not. Hillary won the popular vote, after all — so, by all appearances, we kinda did vote for her. Already our slanted, fucked-up, sliding-to-the-right democracy (sorry, “democracy”) turned out for her in numbers, but the corrupt system upheld its own corruption, and the machine kept on churning anyway. And, yes, had she taken the White House, I suspect we’d be in a better situation — but let’s also remember we’ve given them the run of the table before, and was Roe ever codified? No. Did they sit back idly as McConnell straight-up stole a SCOTUS seat from them? Yes.

Did they fight?

Enh.

Not so much.

So, you want our vote? You want our money? You want our faith? Then you need to show up. You need to scrap and get mad. It’s not necessarily about winning the fight, but it is about fighting it. Show your fucking teeth. Spill some metaphorical blood, because real blood is being spilled in the meantime, gushing from bullet-wounds and broken pregnancies, soaking the white of the flag and then the blue until all we have is red.

But Chuck, someone will say, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and you’re playing right into Republican hands, and hey, maybe you’re right, but I think it’s fair to express this rage, and honestly, if you believe a blog post like this one is contributing to the downfall of society and not, say, malevolent Republicans and craven Democrats, then I don’t know what to tell you.

It isn’t unpatriotic to demand these people put in the work for the nation they were literally elected to protect. It’s their job. It’s literally why we invested our time and money and effort into their election. They’re not our bosses. We’re not their fans. Nobody here is saying don’t show up, don’t vote — but we are saying to our supposed leaders that they need to show up, too. We already did our part, now they need to do theirs. We showed up for them, now they need to show up for us — and that’s how they get us to the ballot box in November. They show up, they work and they fight at any cost, with all the effort they can muster. The loss of Roe is not their harvest of votes to reap without the effort that goes into preserving it. It’s not a freebie. It can’t be the culmination of some grand political calculus. It matters. It’s hurting people right now. They need to act like it.

This is a knife fight, Democrats.

So sharpen your fucking knives and point them toward the enemy.

And stop throwing your progressive members under the bus — they’re the only ones who even seem to give a shit right now.

As for the rest of us, well, we need to hold their feet to the fire, but we should also prepare to learn they don’t care. In the meantime, uphold each other, work for your community, love one another when that love is deserved and returned, because it’s not going to get better right away.

Things fall apart.

The center cannot hold.

We know what rough beast slouches toward us. It has already been born.

Please donate to the national network of abortion funds.

(Sorry.)

HELLO. It’s been a little while, in part because I was caught at the nexus of several sharp-bladed deadlines, all sliding across my neck like swords. I was trapped! By their sharpness and their urgency! In the best way possible, because deadlines are good (er, mostly, except for when they all seem to converge upon me at once), because deadlines mean that I have stuff to do. But it was a lot. A lot a lot. It was a comic book outline, page proofs for Wayward, second draft for my new writing book, first draft for my Evil Apples book. I cleared my plate of most of those, but the latter is ongoing —

I crested 100,000 words in Evil Apples the other day, annnnnd there’s not a lot of sign of stopping? So I’m thinking this will be another huge skull-crusher of a book. Maybe not a proper bison bludgeoner like Wanderers and Wayward, both of which top out at around 280,000 words, but maybe closer to The Book of Accidents, which hit I think 180,000? Whatever. Hope you like it. It contains evil apples. I’ll talk a little more about it when I finish this draft and have some sense of what I even wrote? Because right now I’m just going with it.

So! Things have happened! I can talk about some of them. Let’s do that.

Wayward ARCs

Holy crap, Wayward ARCs (advanced reader copies) are out in the world. They are big. They could be used as boat anchors, or weapons. I’ve seen copies land in the hands of some writers, some bookstores, some libraries. I do not know the scope of this release — I did get a trio of copies myself, though they are now spoken for. I will note for those who get an early copy, it is an early copy, meaning, it’s before my page proof edits were applied — those edits were substantial in number, though I don’t believe in content.

(As some people seem to not realize, this is a sequel to Wanderers. It continues the story of those characters in that world, so reading the first book is, in fact, optimal, though I guess not entirely necessary.)

I hope people like it. It’s a weird book. I barely remember writing it. The area-of-effect miasma of proxy pandemic trauma made it a surreal experience, so when I went back to re-read it during edits I forgot a considerable portion of the book. I think maybe it’s good, though? I think it’s a worthy sequel, which was always my goal–to write something that felt worthy and ultimately essential. I dunno. We’ll see. I apologize if it’s just 800 pages of rude emoji and poopy handprints. It’s possible. The times are strange and I promise nothing.

Hideo Kojima Called Wanderers A Masterpiece

He read the book and said that.

I don’t think there’s anything more for me to say here except, uhh, holy shit.

Oh! I suppose it is worth showing the Japanese edition, though. Not sure if I posted here or not? So, I’ll just show you his photos, because they’re great.

Trippy as hell. It’s one book in two volumes and you have to mash them together to make them kiss. Or at least that’s what I assume the point is.

Do People Eat Barley Anymore? Barely.

I made a recipe the other day with, yes, barley, and I bought it because my mother used to cook with it (her barley soup was pretty legendary), and I don’t see… anyone cooking with it anymore? Though I’m sure I’m just looking in the wrong places. Either way, this is what I did with it, and I think you should do it too, because you are a person who likes to eat yummy things.

Cook pearled barley according to the package, which I think is like, three cups of liquid per cup of barley for 30 mins? Till it’s al dente, which is Italian for, “all fucked up with dents,” maybe, probably. I dunno. I used chicken broth instead of water because, I dunno, who doesn’t like salty chicken water?

Take Brussels sprouts. Do not recoil. If you are not yet on the train to Brussels Sprouts Town, please read my demon cabbages recipe immediately and rectify your business please and thank you. I cut off the stubby stem base, I get off any of the funkier leaves, then I slice it thin. Roast the fuck out of it. I did 375 in a convection oven for 15 minutes, but your oven might want 400 for 20 mins. You want them browned, not burned, and crispy. Oh, before they go into the HELL CHAMBER, you wanna, y’know, oil ’em up and give ’em some S&P.

Now, cook mushrooms. One pound of them at least. I did cremini and chestnut mushrooms, but your mushroom preference here will be great whatever it is, as long as it’s not Poisonous Yard Mushrooms. Slice ’em, get ’em in a hot pan, and you can torment the hell out of mushrooms pretty easily without much worry. Salt and thyme and pepper are all you really need, I think. Once they were cooked down a bit I also sliced some garlic in there (I’d tell you an amount but what’s the point, use as much as you like) and also a sliced shallot. (Though, I also think this would be good if you shallow-fried the shallots first and got them crispy, then used the shallot oil in this application. YMMV.) You can really cook the mushrooms till they’re essentially caramelized–and once that’s happening, once it’s leaving that fond (is it fond if it’s not meat?) on the metal, you can deglaze with a splash of white wine vinegar. Which is great because then the mushrooms soak up that flavor, too. Kill the heat.

Chop up some parsley.

Slice some little tiny tomatoes.

Toast some manner of nuts that you enjoy. I actually had cashews on hand so I roasted those real quick, but walnuts or pecans would be nice here, too.

Maybe have a handful of dried cranberries or cherries ready to go, too.

Let all this stuff cool down. In the meantime, make a dressing of:

One lemon, squozen. Quarter-to-half-cup of olive oil. Some grated garlic clove. Tiny hit of maple syrup or honey. A scant tidbit of dijon mustard. Salt, pepper, any herbs you like. Whisk-a-whisk, and there’s some dressing for you.

Now, combine all this stuff together in a big-ass bowl.

If you’re like me, you’re gonna wanna hit it with another splash of lemon juice after it’s on a plate or in a bowl.

If you’re the kind of person who likes cheese, I did a grated sharp cheddar over it and enjoyed it. But also a nice real Parmesan would go great, too.

Anyway, eat it. It’s very satisfying. Or don’t, I’m not your nutritionist.

Midjourney Artificial Intelligence Art

So, art from artificial intelligence is all the rage these days, from Dall-E Mini to Midjourney. I managed a beta invite to Midjourney and, ummm, uhhh.

I did some things.

Here are some of those things. And I apologize for them.

You can guess what terms I used to gather some of these images, if you’d like, though I’ll tell you that the last one there was “photorealistic Caillou, nightmare.”

Please enjoy.

The last time Maeve saw her cousin was the night she escaped the cult they were raised in. For the past two decades, Maeve has worked hard to build a normal life in New York City, where she keeps everything—and everyone—at a safe distance. When Andrea suddenly reappears, Maeve regains the only true friend she’s ever had. Soon she’s spending more time at Andrea’s remote Catskills estate than in her own cramped apartment. Maeve doesn’t even mind that her cousin’s wealthy work friends clearly disapprove of her single lifestyle. After all, Andrea has made her fortune in the fertility industry—baby fever comes with the territory. The more Maeve immerses herself in Andrea’s world, the more disconnected she feels from her life back in the city; and the cousins’ increasing attachment triggers memories Maeve has fought hard to bury. But confronting the terrors of her childhood may be the only way for Maeve to transcend the nightmare still to come.

In JUST LIKE MOTHER, Heltzel employs an unsettling, cultish environment as a framework for exploring the pressures of motherhood and group think, society’s expectations for women of a certain age, and the extremes of conservative feminism. Atmospheric prose and chilling scenes from a childhood gone wrong will leave readers hungry to discover Maeve’s spine-chilling fate. 

It’s the journey, not the destination

You probably think I’m talking about the journey to publication. This applies in that case too—pub day is rewarding; but it’s the blood, sweat, tears, and tendonitis that you’ll wear like armor when you approach anything challenging in life moving forward.

But what I’m really talking about here is your story. In Just Like Mother there were aspects of the “reveal” that couldn’t be hidden due to the book’s setup. This was a conundrum, because I was aware there may not be the traditional payoff for readers of thrillers. And since Just Like Mother is a horror-thriller hybrid novel, there are certain expectations for BIG TWISTS.

To alter the reveal, I realized I’d have to adjust the entire backstory and setup. I wasn’t opposed to making massive changes, but I was opposed to changing my protagonist’s origin story in service of familiar plot conventions. So instead of focusing on how to make this particular twist more twisty, I focused on how to make the getting there as unexpected, rewarding, and fun as I possibly could.

As someone who tends to know her endings early on and work toward them, I really enjoyed refocusing on making the more mundane aspects of the novel pop: working sinister details into every scene to build atmosphere, veering off in some bonkers directions, playing with mood and tone.

I realized a couple of interesting things when I was playing in the in-between: first, that it’s really fun to let go of the urgency of speeding toward an ending; and second, that I should have been doing this all along anyway. Sure, a great twist in the end is fun (and don’t worry, I did still build in a few surprises!); but it’s the getting there that contains the most payoff.

And my revised strategy seems to have worked! Even when readers can predict the ending, most of them have commented that they really enjoyed getting there—which is the most rewarding feeling!

Write to your emotions

Unfortunately most writers can’t just write when we feel like it or when inspiration strikes. If you are a person like me who experiences a range of emotions throughout any given week, you are in luck! I have found a workaround.

I learned early that my best writing is emotion-driven, and I also learned early to keep a running list of scenes that come to mind, so I can dive in on any scene and will never be lacking inspiration or stuck on what comes next. At any given time, I typically have at least three scenes (and as many as 15) listed in a separate document. The list grows as I get further into the story and know more about my characters and envision them in scenarios that support their narrative arc and are thematically related to the plot. Usually a scene idea will spring randomly to mind while I’m driving or in the shower (times I allow my mind to wander). I keep a million notes on my phone along the lines of, “pumpkin effigy” or “scene in garden no gloves.” When I’m in front of my computer I build out these scenes into a couple of sentences to tie them into the existing text.

Then—here’s the good part—when I really, really don’t feel like writing but know I have to hit a deadline, I pull up my scene list and choose the scene that is most aligned with my emotional state. If I am angry or frustrated, I jump into a scene where my character(s) are experiencing negative emotions. Channeling real emotions into pre-planned scenes results in more visceral, immediate prose—so even on the days when I’m really dragging, I can usually produce something worth keeping.

Pretend no one will ever read it

This is, hands-down, the best thing I learned to do while writing Just Like Mother. Sometimes my brain goes to extremely dark places. Sometimes there’s fear surrounding that tendency. I’m not proud to say I care a little too much about what people think, and I’m always worried about things like disappointing my parents or tarnishing my reputation. (For the record, I know intellectually that my anxieties are mostly unfounded. No one thinks about me that much, and certainly I’m not giving my parents enough credit here. But when your day job is editing kids’ books and you write gruesome horror novels on the side, you consider these things.)

When I first began drafting Just Like Mother, I was having a hard time shaking these anxieties. I played it safe for much of the novel’s start, until I knew something had to change. I wasn’t having fun anymore, and I wasn’t unleashing my imagination. But I know enough about writing to know that playing it safe gets you nowhere, and I had to be gutsier for my novel to succeed.

So I told myself a half-truth: No one but you will ever read this book. It was only a half-truth because at that time, I genuinely didn’t know. There was the very real possibility that no one would read the book—that I’d query agents and get no requests. Writing without any audience in mind served to extinguish all my anxieties about what people might think of me and allowed me to go to some very dark places without fear. It also—crucially—made it necessary for me to enjoy the experience of writing the book versus focusing on publication as the end goal. If no one will ever read your book, it has to mean something to you. It must come from a personal space and serve you in some way, either as practice for the next or an investment in yourself as a creative person. If you pretend no one will ever read the book, you’ll never find yourself asking, “Is it worth it?”

Write for yourself, revise for your readers.

Although I wrote early drafts for myself, I put myself aside entirely when revising. My writing group offered fantastic criticism of my early drafts, and my agent was brilliant and ruthless in terms of cuts (for pacing) and brainstorming (for plot). When I was revising the book prior to going on submission I cut whole characters, multiple scenes, tens of thousands of words. I did it over and over and over, until the book hardly resembled the original. Then I did it again when we sold it. Because at that point the book was no longer about me, and my goals had shifted. Now—knowing that it would be read—my goal was to make it as enjoyable a reading experience as possible. To get there I needed to step outside myself and relinquish attachment to everything I’d just written.

But you know what? After writing purely for myself for years, it was refreshing to write in service of actual readers. You’ll never please everyone, but being able to accept feedback and be unselfish about a thing you are producing for other people’s entertainment is crucial.

Ask me about the character of Will sometime. He now only exists in a folder of “cut scenes” (along with at least a hundred other pages of nixed content!).

Hotel Lobbies are the Secret Sauce

This one is not very enjoyable to consider, but let’s be honest: none of us have great swaths of extra time for dabbling. I talked about Just Like Mother to friends for a solid year before I started writing it, not because I necessarily needed that additional time for the ideas to evolve (though that was part of it), but because I couldn’t “find” the time.

Eventually I grew embarrassed. I was telling people in my life about my book, but my book didn’t exist outside my imagination. It was time to do the work. When I evaluated my schedule, I realized there wasn’t any room at all—I had (still have) a demanding day job, and my evenings and weekends were packed with work and social plans…Oh.

There was one obvious element there that I could drop to make time for writing. For a year I stuck to a strict rule of one night out with friends per week. Most other weekday nights and weekend days, I worked after work. I started looking forward to my weekends for rest and uninterrupted work time. I apologized to friends and family and hoped they’d still be around when I re-emerged (thankfully, they are). And if I felt myself getting too burned out, I’d use Friday night to binge TV rather than write.

I know this isn’t feasible for a lot of people, especially people with partners and children. I was “lucky” in the sense that I was single when writing Just Like Mother. It wouldn’t be possible to ignore my partner now to the extent that I ignored my friends and family then, and it would be even less possible with children involved. Also, my process was somewhat extreme. You don’t have write a book in a year—you can take your time. You can sacrifice one thing per week and use those few hours to work on your book. But it will necessitate sacrifice, one way or another.

I will say this, though: I am not a robot. I thrive around other people. Most coffee shops didn’t stay open at night. Bars were the only establishments open late enough for my writing schedule, but they were too rowdy and didn’t allow laptops in most cases. When I found hotel lobbies, my life changed, and my progress improved exponentially. A nice hotel lobby will let you sit for hours with your laptop. Usually it’s bustling enough in the evening to make you feel stimulated,  and involved (it mimics a social life); and often if you choose to listen to conversations or observe body language, you’ll find inspiration.

My best, most productive post-work writing nights were spent in the lobbies of The Marlton, The Hoxton, and The High Line in New York City with a glass of wine and a snack. Having somewhere to go also forced me to clean up, put on a decent outfit, and generally be more of a human. And it’s fun, because for me these hotels were out of reach financially for an overnight stay, but this way I got to experience their glamor. (Once, though, I treated myself to a stay at The Ludlow on New Year’s Eve with my dog. I wrote in the lobby in the early evening and went up to my room when it got too crowded. I ordered a single glass of champagne for midnight and snuggled my dog in luxurious surroundings, and it remains one of my favorite memories of NYE.) I strongly recommend patronizing a hotel lobby if you live near one. But really any public space with interesting people and snacks will do. Honestly, a mall food court would work just as well.

ANNE HELTZEL is a New York-based novelist and book editor. In addition to writing horror, she has penned several milder titles for children and young adults. Just Like Mother is her adult debut.

Anne Heltzel: Website | Twitter

Just Like Mother: Bookshop | Indiebound

This is not going to be a helpful post, a healthy post, a post of solutions and fixes, a post that makes sense of anything, that catalyzes what we’re all going through, that attempts to be optimistic or do anything at all to understand the pervasive miasma of trauma we are all standing in and breathing. It is a post of sadness and rage, words that I’m not even sure will make much sense, but right now I don’t have anywhere to put them so I’m putting them here.

At the time of this writing, 19 elementary school children are dead in Uvalde, Texas, alongside two teachers at that school. They were shot by an 18-year-old gunman who by all reports went out on his birthday in order to purchase the weapons he used to commit the mass murder of innocents.

If this happened in a vacuum, if this were a single instance, it would have been a colossal failure, a failure that he was able to have those weapons, a failure of a society that produces those weapons, a failure of a system that was unable to protect those children. If this were a singular horror, it would still necessitate scrutiny and action to follow in the wake of sadness and rage. But it isn’t a singular action. It was not one-and-done. There will likely be another mass shooting today or tomorrow. There have already been hundreds this year. There have already been several this week, from the supermarket shooting against Black Americans in Buffalo to the shooting at a Taiwanese-American church in California. And now this. This, another cup of blood poured into an ocean of it. Blood with the hellish stink of gunpowder burned into it. Shell casings gleaming at the bottom of this sea of pain.

And I don’t know what to say, and I don’t know what to do. The greatest frustration with this and so many of our problems isn’t that we are up against an insurmountable problem. We aren’t facing an issue without solution. We have the answers. We have answers that we collectively agree upon. We know there are some very simple, common sense regulations we can levy against both the gun industry and against the buyers of guns. We know what guns are the problem. We know that there are things we can look out for, like how so many of the shooters are also domestic abusers. It is easy and obvious to say, if you have to learn to drive a car, you should learn to use a gun. If you need a license to operate a vehicle, to sell houses, to run a business, to run electricity through a building — then it stands to reason you should have a license to wield a concealable device that can kill dozens of people in the blink of an eye. We can all probably even agree that concealable is a fucked-up metric for guns, and we would wisely ask, why is that even allowed? The (often mythical) “good guys with guns” shouldn’t want to hide that they have them, so the only people who want to conceal a weapon would be someone who intends to do harm. It follows easy logic that if you have to be 21-years-old to drink an alcoholic beverage –you should at least be that old to use a gun. Most of us can understand and agree that a gun is a tool whose sole purpose is to commit violence. That’s what it does. That’s all it’s for. Even if you view it as necessary for defense, that defense means using it to put holes in other people. It’s not a hammer. It doesn’t cook food, despite what that odious shitstain Ted Cruz would tell you in some pro-gun propaganda bullshit video. It’s there to shoot animals or people. It’s there to inject a little metal missile into meat at around 1100+ feet per second. To turn it to pulp. To butcher it. To make it bleed out and end it, same as it was yesterday, when guns were chosen for the explicit purpose of killing kids — killing them so brutally, so profoundly, that the only way to know who they were was by fetching DNA from their parents in the hopes of making a match.

We all understand. And most of us probably even agree on it. Same as we know how to slow or even halt climate change. Same as we know what helps stave the spread of COVID-19. We know how to save lives, how to accept our kids for who they are, how to share love to stop hate. We know the answers. We even want the solutions. But here we are. Year after year. The same problems. The same problems, growing worse. Cracks in the foundation spreading, poised to collapse. And nothing is done. And nothing is done. And nothing is done. Children dragged onto an altar, killed in service to monstrous capitalist Christofascist interests who will lie with their shit-slick tongues and tell you they are pro-life, pro-life, pro-life, that they care about kids in schools, that masks are abuse and we cannot have them, that the cure is worse than the disease, that we don’t want kids to learn anything harmful, oh no, not ever, but wait, what’s that, they don’t care if their policies lead to kids getting shot again and again, to kids considering suicide because they are denied joy and love because of who they love or how they identify or what the color of their skin looks like, and when kids die, when women die, when anybody dies, they say oh, thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers, maybe if we armed more people, maybe if we paid more blood and money to get more bullets, maybe if we gave teachers guns, maybe we give kids guns, maybe we give fetuses guns, more guns, more bullets, more blood, as long as we are getting paid, as long as we are getting re-elected, as long as we are biting into the meat of power with our teeth and holding on so tight you’ll never, ever shake us.

Republicans want obeisance to some mad, deranged version of the Constitution, as long as that version keeps them fat and happy and in control. They’ve lost the thread, lost their humanity. They’ve lost democracy, the very thing their precious Constitution hoped to entrench. And the other party, the Democrats, are generally on the side of justice, but can barely be seen to do so because they mumble and shrug and shuffle their feet instead of getting loud, getting mad, throwing (metaphorical) punches in the media and on the chamber floor. They’ve so bought into this collegial lie, this notion that the GOP won’t cut off their fingers just for trying to shake hands, that it’s killing us. The GOP are greedy aggressors; the Democrats are mealy-mouthed glad-handers. On one side: the monsters. On the other side: the cowards. Here we are, banning books, when we need to be banning guns. But who’s fighting for us? Who’s not only speaking out, but genuinely fighting? Who will help us?

I don’t know what to do or what to say and it feels all the more angering. I only know that we are all on this bus, driving fast down the highway with a driver who is increasingly cruel and unstable. All we have to do is unseat the driver. And I don’t know how we do that, but there’s more of us than there are of them. There are a lot of passengers, but only one driver. And we better figure it out real goddamn soon, because our tires are wet with blood and it won’t be long before they drive us off a fucking cliff. It’s already too late for those 19 kids in Uvalde.

But maybe we can save the next 19 if we’re willing to get up out of our seats.

I’m a new writer who’s not a new writer. 

What I mean is, I’ve been writing a looong time and only now do I have a debut novel. Experience (or age) doesn’t make me unique in any sense, but it adds a certain perspective to this whole ride. My expectations are…lower? Don’t get me wrong, I’m very interested in my books existing. Being read! Selling! Made into comics, tv, and movies! But I don’t expect those things, at least, not anymore. I did, in the early days, despite telling myself I was a realist.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha.

I could write pages of the things I believed before writing NINE TENTHS that I’ve since set aside, for the better. I’ll share five of them with you, because five is Chuck’s limit and he won’t let me out of the cellar if I disobey.

I’m A Morning Writer, Or You Control Your Environment

This lesson was the simplest. In the early years I worked in the late afternoon or early evening because life, or so I thought. In reality, I slept late. I could have been writing, but I chose sleep. Fine, if that works for you. It didn’t work for me. A lot of my late-day production was a slog.

Enter children and school.

What ye olde folks don’t tell you is when your kids go to school, so do you. The hours, the activities, the homework–the whole burden returns. My precious morning sleep disappeared. I wasn’t busy for an entire extra two hours, but I certainly had to function earlier in the day. I realized since I was awake, I might as well write. And at that hour (now) the words flowed easier than in the evening. My brain wasn’t mush from a full day of “other work”. I was energized and eager to attack the novel in progress. The scheduling switch didn’t occur to me organically—it took my children starting school for me to pivot to morning writing. I wish I’d learned (earlier) to play with scheduling, and jumpstart my creativity.

This is not me saying you should write in the morning. This is me saying you should learn when you’re most productive, and write then, as much as life allows. Sometimes you’ll have to make trade-offs. (Dream about donuts or wake up and finish that novel because no one else will.)

I Wasn’t The Second Coming Of FAMOUS WRITER

You’d think I’d know better. EVERYONE falls for this. And I certainly said the correct things, out loud. But inside my head, I marched to a different drum. They’re going to think you’re amazing. I could hear them. Look at this guy, he nailed a bestseller on the first try. Established authors would contemplate their own work, the horror dawning as they realized I was so much better at everything literary.

Please see extended laughter above.

Turned out, I had no idea what I was doing. I relied on plenty of cheap writing tricks. My plots lacked direction and urgency. My characters had no agency. I cobbled together approaches and themes from various authors I happened to be reading–pastiche. Again, this experience isn’t atypical. I mention it so maybe a handful of you manage to silence your early author hubris. I mean, confidence is valuable, but then there’s delusion.

I learned I had skill gaps. I still do. And that’s fine. I can be the writer I am. So can you.

What You Think Is Clever Dialog Is Not A Story

Up until very recently I wrote dialog with a blind eye. Early feedback complimented my dialog, and in a world where I had any number of other writing struggles, I was more than happy to believe I had dialog sewn up. At least I know how people talk and translate that to the page. In my head, the characters bantered endlessly, entertaining with every word they uttered and I transcribed. Cut the dialog, I thought to myself. But, it’s so good.

Again, see cruel laughter above.

At the risk of sounding like a jerk, my dialog wasn’t bad. Dialog writing was one of the easiest parts of the process, for me. The problem was failing to turn a critical eye to the words my characters spouted. Did the words matter? Did they serve more than one purpose, advance plot, or reveal character? And if the dialog did nothing else but seem incredibly fun to read, was it notable? Meaning maybe limit myself to one or two moments of clever for the sake of clever in the whole book, rather than one or two moments per page, Macfee, you dumbass.

It’s great to have a strength. But even strength needs editing. If nothing else, mine did.

A Unique Premise Isn’t The Most Important Element

When I first had the idea for NINE TENTHS, the premise of an ordinary man who repossessed augmented (superhero) devices, I knew I had a winner. At the time (I’m not going to list a year, but it will become clear it wasn’t recent) superhero media was rare. I wasn’t aware of anyone who’d taken the angle of an ordinary person in a world where superheroes were the norm. The combination of repo man and superhero felt fresh. THIS IDEA IS SO GREAT, NOTHING CAN STOP ME.

Enter the MCU. And scads more brutal laughter.

I still think my story is unique, or unique enough. But after I accepted the whole superhero market saturation thing (or mostly accepted) I realized what I should have realized all along—it’s the characters, stupid. If I cared about the characters, other people would care. If I kept the characters interesting, if I was true to the story I was telling, basically if I followed all the writing fundamentals, I’d still have a good, maybe great, story, regardless how many superhero movies and tv shows existed. “The idea” is but a small first step. Lots of people have ideas. Very few people deliver on them (or even try).

Creating A Story Is Fun (Forget, Relearn, Repeat)

The whole point of writing is that you, the author, enjoy the process. Why else are you writing? It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme—there’s not enough storage space in the world to contain the typed laughter. You’re writing because it’s fun. Making stuff up, seeing the nonsense you invented become a real live book, to have people get what you wrote, enjoy it, imagine up their own version in their heads—this is cool stuff. Most amazing of all–sometimes, every once in a while, you might even read your own writing and think–I did pretty damn good. That’s the point.

But writing is also real work. Producing a novel requires discipline. We’re not talking manual labor, but it’s structured. Regarding writing as a task requiring effort is a great lesson to learn, and learn early, but living that lesson does run the risk of obscuring the reason you started down the path in the first place. My writing benefitted from outlines, spreadsheets, supporting research, and inspirational documents. But this type of somewhat grindy work pushed the fun parts from my mind. And after long enough the “all work and no play” approach was reflected in my writing. I had to remind myself the process was fun. Who writes thousands of words with no promise they’ll earn a dime? Who sinks countless hours into creating a whole world that may never see the light of day? People trapped in hell, and those who think they’re having fun, that’s who.

I had to relearn this lesson along the way. Put on new writing music. Write a whole new section that might not survive edits. Write in second person. Forget all the writing rules for a day or two and let the crazy fly. Then I reactivated editor-brain and folded in the pieces that made my writing better. Even if zero of those tangents succeeded, I’d recharged myself.

Depressing note–I forgot this lesson more than once. You will too. Forget. Relearn. Repeat.

If I learned anything at all writing NINE TENTHS, it was to be better, at everything. The book taught me about my own life as much as writing. I need to be a better version of myself if I want to have any success as a writer. And by success, I mean regular joy in the daily writing process, regardless of how many books I ever sell.

Was that a sixth thing I learned? Of course not.

*checks lock on cellar door*

***

Jeff Macfee is a writer. His work has appeared in Needle: A Magazine of Noir, Shotgun Honey, and the anthology Killing Malmon. Nine Tenths is his debut novel.

Jeff Macfee: Website | Twitter

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