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.

Once again, I arrive with clumsy flourish, to bring you whatever thoughts I can squeeze from my soggy braincake. (I saw Soggy Braincake on the side stage at Lollapalooza, 1994.) Increasingly I am of a mind that treating this blog occasionally like a newsletter is not the worst idea, as those who subscribe get this neat little bundle hand-delivered by digital elves upon me clicking Publish. So, let’s get to it, shall we?

Go Watch Only Murders In The Building Now, Right Now, Hurry Up

Did you like Ted Lasso? Did you want to feel that way again? Then I have the show for you. Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez fucking kill it in this murder-mystery — it’s got more NYC sensibilities than Ted Laddo’s melange of Midwest and UK vibes, but it’s ultimately still not overly cynical. It’s funny, it’s murdery, it’s occasionally sweet. I won’t spoil it but the finale had me laughing so hard we had to pause the show so we didn’t miss anything. It’s really fucking great, and it deserves your eyeballs. And awards. And a puppy. Sidenote: Selena Gomez should be on deck to play Miriam Black in a Blackbirds adaptation for television. Dear universe, please make this happen, thank you. *stares very hard at the universe*

On The Other Hand, Succession?

I continue to bounce very hard off this show. It’s not the show’s fault. The show is brilliant. It’s a me problem, not a them problem. I’ve tried watching it a few times now, and I’ve never made it through the first season. I find the characters not merely reprehensible, but each of them bleeds this miasma of second-hand-embarrassment that makes me almost literally recoil. Again, to the credit of the show, I recognize this is intentional — and the actors are very clearly nailing it. They’re exceptional. But I can’t crack it. It’s also possible I’m watching it at the wrong time — not the wrong time in the world (though that’s part of it, too, in that I don’t necessarily want to watch a bunch of Murdochian fuckheads traipse about being epic douchebags), but I mean, literally, the wrong time of day. As we have a kidlet running around, I tend to watch more (ahem ahem) mature programming at night before bed, and before bed is not when I want to feel tense from watching Murdochian fuckheads. Part of me thinks, what if I watch it during the day? Maybe. Hmm.

It’s interesting to me, because a show like Billions works for me, and yet those characters are reprehensible, too. Sopranos, Breaking Bad, all of them contain largely reprehensible and irredeemable characters, but they’re… even when not necessarily redeemable, still human. The characters of Succession are satirical, in part, and that means they’re more openly cartoonish, buffoonish, and sinister. Their humanity is harder to find. I think there’s a trick to making unlikable characters, and as I’ve long said, it’s to worry less about likability and more about livability. Like, can you live with these characters as narrative roommates, even if they’re fuckheads? You can get away with more of this when the story is in a shorter format, right? Like, a movie makes it easier, because it’s 90-120 minutes in, then you’re out. But a TV show demands you stew in it, and sometimes it feels like hanging out in a septic tank instead of a spa tub.

But, again, I note: brilliant show, and I think I just need to approach it differently.

That, or it’s not just a show for me, which is also totally a thing!

Children Ask Amazing Questions

So, in case I haven’t crammed it into your eyeholes enough, hey, I wrote a middle grade book! Molly Grim inherits a funeral home for monsters and has to share the inheritance with a brother, Dustin, she’s never met. Dust & Grim! Please go buy it or get it from a library lest I wither like a dying spider, legs curling inward as I gently turn over onto my back! Or something.

Anyway!

So, this week I’ve done my first ever school visits (well, not really first ever as I’d visited my son’s school in the past), but at the very least, the first in support of a single book, and the first done over Zoom. And it’s weird, of course, because basically you get up there and talk at a screen for 20, 30 minutes, and I just sort of blather and stammer about my book and hope that I’m not totally boring the children to absolute tears. But! But. Then we get to the Q&A portion, and that is my favorite. Because kids ask amazing questions.

They don’t come up and say HELLO THIS IS MORE OF A COMMENT THAN A QUESTION, they don’t ask convoluted fan questions or crawl-up-your-own-ass-with-pretension questions.

They just ask really cool questions.

Sometimes they’re really simple, like

HI MY NAME IS JORDAN WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE MONSTER

And it’s like, uhh yeah, hell yeah, that’s a fun question, I want to answer that question. No sarcasm. That’s a delight. Other times, they ask really weird questions like

HOW MUCH DO YOU THINK ALL YOUR INTERNAL ORGANS WEIGH

And it’s like, okay, that’s a fun one, too, let’s game that out, let’s do the math.

Then! Then I had one group who was very clearly doing a unit on writing, because they asked some seriously hard-hitting questions about writing. This is no joke, these are not made-up questions:

HOW DO YOU BUILD SUSPENSE IN A BOOK

HOW DO YOU MAKE ANTAGONISTS LIKABLE

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN TO END A CHAPTER

HOW DO YOU USE THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF FORESHADOWING

WHERE AND HOW SHOULD YOU START A STORY

Like, uhh, haha, oh shit those are real questions. Can’t I just talk about my favorite monster again? Those are real-deal writing queries, and the kids were really thoughtful, and it was wonderful.

Kids are cool.

Anyway.

Our Dog, The Bug That Is Snoo

Hey, our dog is doing okay, for those who have asked (and thanks!). She had multiple courses of anti-b’s, and has to have her BUTT GHOSTS exorcised once a month at present, but so far, that’s holding the Wolves of Surgery at bay.

Advancing The Advance Conversation

I don’t know what started it, but on Twitter there has been quite a bit of fol-de-rol over the question: is $100,000 is a big advance or not? I take it some author said it wasn’t, or it wasn’t as big as you’d think, or what-have-you.

So, let me clear up my thoughts on this:

It’s a big advance.

It’s also not automagically life-changing.

It can be.

But it isn’t necessarily.

The thing is, as with nearly all discussions, there is a whole lot of nuance that has to get packed into it, and generally speaking, Twitter is a place where nuance goes to die. Nuance are bumps and splinters, and every conversation on that cursed bird-site sands those bumps and splinters down. Everything gotta be this or that over there. But the bumps and splinters are texture…

And texture is a necessity.

Consider:

Some advances are as low as $10,000.

So, a $100k advance is higher by 10x, which makes it pretty sizable.

And if you’re already working a full-time job, that money — on top of your other money — probably makes a big damn difference, and can change your life. Maybe not lottery money life-changing, but, hey, it’s a huge pressure off.

And yet, there are… considerations.

First, you’re going to give 15% of that to an agent. So now it’s a $85k advance.

Second, you’re going to give some portion of that to taxes. Assume, bare minimum, you’re going to give 25% of that to taxes, so you’re going to be left with ~$60k out of that initial $100k advance.

Third, that advance will not be paid to you all at one time. It will be divvied up in 3-5 payments. First, on signing. Then at various other mile-markers along the way: when you turn in a draft and it is accepted by the publisher, when it is published, when trade paperback comes out a year later, when there’s a Super Blue Blood Wolf Harvest Moon, when the Moon Hits Your Eye Like A Big Pizza Pie, when you finally kill your first man in Reno — whatever. There are gates, and you gotta walk through those gates to trigger a payment.

So, if in 1/3rds, you’re going to get roughly $20k each time.

And that can be paid out over the course of 1-2 years, depending on how long the process takes. Publishing a book is not fast. Drafting a book to reaching bookshelves is a journey.

Fourth, is it for one book, this deal? If so, well done, good job. If it’s $100k for, say, a three book deal, that hits real different. Because now it’s more books, more time, and less money per book.

Fifth, where do you live? Is it San Francisco? Then congrats, that advance just paid for your annual coffee budget. Is it Ohio? Congrats, you can put a payment down on a reasonable home! Where you live really matters as how far that dollar goes. That’s not to say living in San Francisco isn’t amazing — certainly you’re in the midst of a lot of culture in a city, culture you might not so easily access in, say, Centralia, Pennsylvania. (Aka, THE EVER-BURNING TOWN.) But access to that kind of culture is not cheap. Sadly. Cruelly. We continue to silo parts of our country and culture to the Already Wealthy. (Which writers generally are not, to remind.)

And a final consideration is that publishers, now trying to portion out the payments over more stages and longer periods, are also enjoying an industry that is on the rise — book sales are up, not down, during the pandemic. (Though no telling what supply chain issues will do to that.) And, my personal opinion is that they’re also spending less money to send authors out on tour or go to conventions, so, it does in fact feel like a bit of a sting to try to stretch those payments out even further, thus diminishing the very idea of what an “advance” is supposed to be. (The core idea of an advance is, or was, “Here is money you can live on while you edit this book and ideally, write the next one.”)

Anyway. All this is a very long-winded way to say, again:

Yes, $100k is a big advance. It is important to note that.

It’s also important to note it’s not as big as you think — or, rather, it doesn’t go as far as you think. And overselling a $100k advance as being this WHOA WOW LIFE-CHANGING EXPERIENCE runs the risk of empowering publishers in continuing to pretend that they’re doing you a favor. (As a reminder, publishers are not your friend. The people inside them are wonderful, and as an industry I am of a mind that it’s a whole lot healthier than many, many others. Even still, be careful about assuming that any scraps you receive are a gift to you, rather than what is owed — or less than what you should be owed.)

Moving on.

Where’s Wald–Uhh, I Mean, Where’s Wendig

I was super gonzo cuckoopants lucky to get to talk to the wonderful Felicia Day, who invited me onto her podcast, Felicitations, to talk about APPLES. Not the computer. Nay. The fruit. The gorgeous, weird, wonderful fruit. Heirloom apples and Johnny Appleseed and apple detectives and we also talked about books and I think cryptocurrency? I dunno. It got weird. Anyway! I had a ton of fun on this and thanks to Felicia for having me on. Go check it out.

What else?

Dust & Grim got a shout-out from Bloody Disgusting (!!) as one of ten horror books perfect for the Halloween reading season, saying: “Wendig offers a whimsical spooky tale full of ghosts, vampires, fairies, cryptids, and monsters of all types for the young and young at heart. Wendig crafts a middle school read that treats his target audience with respect. In other words, it may be a lighthearted horror fairy tale, but the author isn’t afraid to inflict pain or heighten the stakes.”

The Book of Accidents got listed by Kirkus as one of their 13 scariest books of 2021!

I did a Q&A with Publishers Weekly if you wanna read that interview. I mostly talk about writing Dust & Grim! But also a little about writing during a pandemic, too.

Tonight, I get to hang with one of my best homies, Delilah S. Dawson, where we’re *haughty tone* TWO AUTHORS IN CONVERSATION, talking about writing and middle grade and scary stuff and spoopy stuff and who knows what else. That’s at 7pm EST tonight, please come and check it out.

Finally, Dust & Grim got its third (!) starred review, this one from the BCCB, saying: “Wendig thrills, enchants, and amuses in equal measure with this uniquely bizarre fantasy adventure.” That full review will be published in their November issue.

What I Have Been Filling My Brain With Lately

Playing: Been rounding the bend on my Mass Effect playthrough, halfway through ME3, now. It’s such a fantastic series. There’s supposed to be an ME4, yeah?

Reading: Kiersten White’s Hide and Gabino Iglesias’ The Devil Takes You Home. The former is a sharp-toothed amusement-park thrill-ride where a game of reality show hide and seek goes, uhhh, let’s just go with “horribly awry.” And the latter is a gut-stabbing horrory noir about crime and consequence born of out of the struggle of poverty, and the tangled nightmare of grief. Both great reads. Now onto Alex Segura’s so-far-excellent Secret Identity. Crime novel set in the world of 1970s comic book industry.

Watching: Only Murders, obviously. Gonna try to watch Dune this weekend. Watching John Stewart’s new show, which was good, if a little pokey — not that I need or desire my news-explorations shows to be funny, but Last Week Tonight and Daily Show still do it better, I think. Stewart’s show still feels like it’s finding its feet, and honestly, I haven’t been too enamored that lately he went in on the “lab leak” notion for COVID-19 origins (which so far is an unsubstantiated theory), and also that he was supporting Chapelle with his anti-trans sentiment in The Closer — while I recognize that comedy is comedy, I also think these guys really want to have their cake and to eat it, too. They want comedy to be this truth-telling medium where the jokes are actually in some way revelatory, saying what we all think. But then when they’re called on it, the jokes suddenly become “just jokes, not serious, how dare you get mad at jokes, jokes are equal-opportunity offenders,” as if comedy requires a victim to be funny. Then they go in on cancel culture, claiming they’re victims of it from their streaming TV shows that backed the money truck up to their houses. I don’t mean to suggest the comedians are vile or monstrous people, but I really think they both want the power of comedy to be this epic, transcendent thing — until they receive the mildest of criticisms, at which point, they turtle up and say, OH WAIT THESE ARE JUST DUMB JOKES, YOU DICKHEADS, HOW DARE YOU TRY TO QUASH MY FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION, ANYWAY, SEE YOU LATER ON MY TV SHOW. I’m not even picking on Stewart overmuch here, or really, even just Chapelle — it’s a deeper trend of very sensitive comedians, usually men, who can’t seem to take criticism. Jokes matter, until they don’t, etc. No one can just say, “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings.” Meanwhile, they’ll never choose to identify with right-wing Trumpy-types, even though their core message remains ultimately the same: “Fuck your feelings, I can say what I want.”

Wow, that was a longer rant than I intended. Hm.

Regardless, given the Netflix walkout, organized by Trans*, you should join me and consider a donation to an organization like The Trevor Project or the Audre Lorde Project.

ANYWAY, NOW HERE ARE SOME PHOTOS.

Some photos!

Okay, first photo up (and you can see all my photos at Flickr) is maybe one of my most favoritest photos of all time. Every year I try to capture shots of golden-crowned kinglets, and these little fuckers are hard to capture. They move like a blinking cursor. They often stay on the interior of evergreens. Usually my shots of them are just blurry bird-ass. But this year, they’ve been more personable, and there have been a lot of them. So, I got this shot:

Like HOLY CRAP look at the iridescence through the wing! Really lucky with that shot.

More below: