As we enter the final lap here, with The Book of Accidents releasing next week (ahhhhh), I figured it was a good time to do one more pre-release roundup.

I posted tour information and where to get signed copies already, buuuut — if you wanted to buy signed copies in the UK, then I have that info available, as well:

Waterstones

Forbidden Planet

Goldsboro Books

Let’s see, what else?

A starred review from Booklist:

“Wendig has fashioned a horror story that feels at once old-fashioned and cutting-edge, masterfully taking a familiar scenario and shaking it up to devastating effect. More proof, if proof were still needed, that Wendig is a force to be reckoned with across genres.”

And a starred review from Library Journal:

“Wendig’s latest is a bold, impressive novel with fierce intelligence and a generous, thrumming heart; this is the author writing at the height of his powers. It’s intimate and panoramic. It’s humane and magical. It’s a world-hopping, time-jumping ride that packs a deep emotional punch.

…blends horror, fantasy, and small-town family drama in an ambitious epic that spans both a multitude of worlds and the interior expanse of the human heart. This one’s essential.”

The audiobook is narrated by Xe Sands and George Newbern — available here.

And tonight I’m a part of the virtual Random House Open House, doing a panel about hot new summer reads — you can find details here on how to attend!

I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering the book or asking your library to carry it. It’s weird to launch a book during a pandemic and I’m still… not entirely sure how I’m doing on that front. And it’s an intensely personal book, to boot, a heart-on-sleeve kind of novel, so hopefully it connects and people find their heart is there in the book, too. (Don’t worry, I didn’t steal your heart. Just… borrowed it, for a little bit.) If you’re so inclined to spread the word, that is a great favor you can do. Thanks, and hope you enjoy the book. One more week. Commence to freaking out.

PSST. HEY, KID. WANNA BUY A SIGNED COPY OF A BOOK?

If you are one of those nice people inquiring about how you buy a signed copy of The Book of Accidents, I have the “deets” (do the kids say “deets” anymore, they probably don’t, oh god I’m ancient, a crumbling mummy, a rain-soaked wasp nest, nooooo) —

Here, then, are your ways to procure a signed copy:

If you want a signed, personalized copy, meaning, I sign it to THROMDAX THE EVER-DELIQUESCING or whatever your actual name is (Gary, perhaps!), and then I hastily, sloppy pen my actual autography underneath it?

Then you have three options:

Doylestown Bookshop

Let’s Play Books

Midtown Scholar

All three are tied to the joint event I’m doing with Aaron Mahnke to launch the book. Requests for personalization, at least with Doylestown, run up to July 15th.

The other bookstores hosting me for virtual events will also have signed (not personalized) copies available, should you be so inclined.

Finally, there’s: Barnes & Noble, and Books-a-Million!

Ta-da!

Also, as a sidenote, if you were so inclined to pick up my first novel, Blackbirds, you can do so digitally this month for the meager coinage of $1.99. Please enjoy.

MORE SOON BYE

Looking back over my emails, I am reminded that it was this week in the Ancient Year 2011, when my super-agent Stacia Decker sold my first original novel, Blackbirds, to Angry Robot Books. That book, about a young woman with a very foul mouth and a terrible attitude who can also see how you’re going to die when she touches you, took five years to write and two years to publish (a year to sell, a year to build up to its release). I wrote the sequel to it, Mockingbird, in thirty days. From there, I’ve had a fairly successful — and, to be sure, privileged-as-fuck — career. In that time, I’ve published 23 novels, plus two books of writing advice, a book of magic skeletons lovingly drawn by Natalie Metzger, not to mention a few novellas, a handful of comics, and some other miscellaneous debris. I’ve two more books coming out this year, and another three novels contracted after that, and another book of writing advice. I’ve met wonderful people, readers and authors and idols, not to mention amazing booksellers, librarians, and publishing humans. I got to work in (and then mayyyyybe get blacklisted from?) Star Wars. I get to do this as my full-time job from inside the weird wonderful box that is my murder shed writer shed. It’s been a lot more good than it has bad.

And, and, and and and, yesterday I just completed the first draft of a new book — Wayward, the sequel to Wanderers, which currently is clocking in at almost exactly the same word count: ~280,000 words. I started writing it in September, a book about the after-effects of an apocalyptic global pandemic, written during a *checks notes* global pandemic. It’s a weird book. I don’t know if it’s a good book. I enjoyed it. It’s epic. My glorious editor, Tricia Narwani, will know how to reduce it to its constituent atoms in order to rebuild it into something better.

So, here we are.

I am a lucky boy.

Initially, my plan was, let’s revisit the career and figure out what the hell I’ve learned. Did I learn anything? Can I tell people what that thing was? After all, I’m a writer, and this is a blog. Listicles are a thing, even if they sound a little like testicles? I could do a classic return to the 25 Things series which populated this space for many, many years. But —

Ennh.

Ennh?

Ennh.

I’ve said so much about writing. Do I have twenty-five new things to tell you? Probably not. I know less about writing now than I did ten years ago. Some of that is born off of the hollow, callow confidence of youth — some of that comes from the rigors of a hopscotching career bouncing from this genre to that format to this style and back again. I have learned that I don’t know how to write a book, and that’s a very good thing. I learned that when I finish writing a book, I’m a different writer from when I began. And when I start the next book, I’m a different writer again. Every book demands you be the writer to write that book and that book alone. Your process can change book to book, chapter to chapter, day to day. You learn a lesson with one book that doesn’t apply to the next. As I am wont to say, this shit ain’t math. You can’t plug your collected reagents into the crafting table and get a diamond pick-axe. It’s a different adventure every time, because that is the nature of adventure. If it was the same every time? Well, it wouldn’t be a fucking adventure, would it?

So, instead of twenty-five things I learned, I instead thought–

Is there one thing?

Is there one lesson I would attempt to impart to others, even knowing full well that writing advice is bullshit, that it is a product of survivorship bias and would end up a piece of advice guaranteed to be useful only to the writer who gives it?

It took me a little while to realize what I would impart.

And what I would impart is this:

You need to know thyself as a writer.

You need to know who you are.

That’s easily said, but heroically done.

Before I get too into the weeds, though, let’s talk about what that even means.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of, well, okay, you need confidence to be a writer. Or you need, what, skill? Talent? Is talent even a thing? (Probably not.) Ah! A process, that’s it, you need a single-bullet one-size-fits-all process. We accept this, and so we begin to mythologize our processes, our standards, our ways and means of doing this thing we do. (It’s often in this place, at this time, that we start to offer advice to others. As we internalize our process, we tell others how to do the same with theirs.) This feels like Knowing Thyself. “This is what I do,” you say. “This is how I accomplish it.” It becomes codified. It becomes folklore. It’s the legend we tell of ourselves.

And it’s… maybe mostly bullshit.

It is not, in fact, Knowing Thyself.

What I mean is this: knowing your process is not the same thing as knowing yourself. Process is just recipe. It’s an Ikea instruction manual. But what you’re doing is telling stories, making art. Yes, there is procedure and process, but at the end of the day, your process will inevitably fail you. The recipe will stop working. You have the instruction manual to build a Billy Bookcase but now you’re making a Fjärngblorg Swedish Fornication Chair, and lemme tell ya, that is a whole different animal.

When your process fails you, it can destroy you. Short term, long term, it can cut your throat. It’ll make you feel like an impostor. It’ll make you feel like you’re lost in the woods. Except —

If you know yourself as a writer, that failure becomes understood. It’s expected.

It becomes a natural part of this journey: the failure and transformation of process.

Death and rebirth. Haughty, weighty shit, I know, and I’m sorry it sounds so fucking airy, but that’s what it feels like — every story, you’re reborn, and somewhere writing that story, you die again.

Forgive the following ambles into Metaphor Town, but it’s how I think, how I convey wriggly ideas, and it’s how I (attempt to, probably poorly) instruct.

Think of it this way: when you move into a new domicile (house, apartment, bear cave, elf tree, whatever), it is new to you. You might wake up in the middle of the night early on and forget how to find the bathroom. You might not even remember where you are. You will have light switches that are a literal mystery to you. They don’t seem to turn anything on. You will smell smells and hear sounds that are odd, maybe even off-putting. But as the weeks and months progress, you begin to know your house, don’t you? You know its creaks and groans, and can differentiate the normal “house settling sound” from “that is a hoofed demon sneaking into my kitchen to steal my lemon cookies, that motherfucker.” You know when a smell is just the heater kicking on and when the cookie demon is smoking a cigar. You can make your way through the house in the dark.

Or, think of it another way: when you learn how to cook, it’s all about the recipe and the ingredients. You arrange the items, you put them into the pot in the order that is described, and you eat the thing you made. Maybe it’s bad, good, great, whatever. But after years of cooking, you change that a little — or, at least, I did. You start to learn how to rescue a dish that’s going south. You start to learn what will kick up a dish, and not simply in a way that is simplistically designed as “better,” but that is instead “more keyed to your preferences.” You learn that you prefer this chili powder to that chili powder. You also go beyond just ingredients, right? “This needs acid,” you think, and you think about what acids are available to you (citrus, vinegar, fermentation, Xenomorph innards) and what they bring to the dish and why that taste is essential to you.

Or, let me try this metaphor, see how it lands: I experience the joy (/sarcasm) of generalized anxiety. Panic disorder, all that happy shit. It’s not severe, but it’s ever-present. The trick is, I know it. I view it like heartburn: I know there are triggers, I know what many of them are (and a few I don’t), I know usually how to avoid it, I know how to medicate against it, and I know that when those first two things fail (avoidance, medication), I know how to deal with the actual attack if it happens. (Ironically, anxiety can cause heartburn, and heartburn can trigger anxiety, in a delightfully fun feedback loop that is, I suppose, neither here nor there.) There are strategies to deal with it that range from meditation to logical thinking to simply letting it run its course with the recognition that this thing will not last forever and I’ve been here before, it was fine every time, and sometimes you have to let the river take you where the river takes you. It’s not a perfect system, but it provides comfort.

In the above examples, there are three pieces I want to grab hold of with my crab pincers, pluck them out, and plop them onto the sand in front of you, my sweet sweet crabby prizes.

a) You can make your way through it in the dark.

b) Why that taste is essential to you.

c) It provides comfort.

These are the three reasons to Know Thyself as a writer.

You will encounter a great many difficulties as a writer. As noted, your process will fail. You will be challenged by critics, reviewers, editors, agents, some of whom are very good, some of whom are not good, some of whom who have the story’s best interests at heart, and some who have only their own interests at the fore. You will sometimes get lost in a story. You will sometimes lose confidence in it, or yourself. You will at times feel like an impostor. You will compare yourselves to others. You’ll have a book nobody wants to publish. You’ll publish a book nobody reads. And so on, and so forth.

But in all things, you can go to ground and make it through —

You can find your way through in the dark.

You can know what you like and what you don’t like.

You can find comfort in who you are and what you’ve done —

And, you also gain comfort in the chaos.

When your process fails, when a book isn’t working, when you’re stuck, you need a rope to hold onto through the dark to make your way through the forest. When an editor or critic tells you this thing doesn’t work, you come to know what darlings you can kill and what hills you need to die on, because you know what pieces of that story are yours, or moreover, are You. And when the shit hits the fan, you know the river will take you where the river will take you, and you find comfort in the uncertainty — because this whole thing we do is wildly uncertain.

You start to understand the weird noises, the base components, the triggers.

You can predict the hills and valleys. Both creatively and in the business.

And you can know how those things are temporary. How failure is a step forward that feels like a step backward. How you will lose confidence in the work at certain milestones and how the self-doubt is normal, not exceptional. You’ll know when you can weather through and when you can’t, or shouldn’t. You’ll know what the first and last days of writing a book feels like, and how much time you need to take off between trying to edit it. You’ll figure it out.

And for me, it’s what allows me to keep going. It’s what lets me hold onto the ladder and not fall into the fucking abyss. Now, the big question is —

How?

How the hell do you Know Thyself as a writer?

It’s reductive to say, you just do, but that’s at the core, the answer. You just do. And that word, “do,” is key — do, being an active word, not a passive one. You write. You write and you rewrite and you fail and you give up and then you try again and you buy the house and you start cooking and you get heartburn and, and, and. You do it even though it’s silly and feels weird like it’s somebody else’s underpants and you put the bucket on your head and try to headbutt the wall until it falls down or you do. You write. You fail. You write again. And you do so with a special eye toward that ultimate goal: Knowing Thyself. Not just process. Not just recipe and equation, but really figuring out who you are, what you like to read, what you like to write, what experiences you bring to the page and what experiences you want to have in the future so you can bring them to the page. You try to be present within yourself. You try to be mindful of the whole journey, not just its parts.

It sounds hard. And it’s the hardest thing. But also the easiest thing. Because you are who you are. Your voice isn’t a thing you hunt down, it’s the thing you have had all along. It’s like how you don’t always know you’re home until you leave it for a while. It’s hard, and it’s easy, and above all else, it’s really, really weird. But that’s it. That’s my lesson. To me, and maybe to you, if it’s useful.

Know Thyself.

Hopefully I’ll see you in another ten years, where my one lesson will be, just exist, or something equally bizarre and reductive! Also if you’re so inclined to pre-order The Book of Accidents or Dust & Grim, they’re coming out soon, and I need to feed myself and my family, and if I can’t feed them with words, I will have to begin to hunt humans for their meat, and nobody wants that. Bye!

So, The Book of Accidents is out on July 20th — holy crap, one month away?! — and I will be appearing at various bookstores in support of it! The trick is, like most authors during the Quarantimes, I’ll be appearing at these bookstores from the comfort of my own li’l writing shed, rising as a virtual ghost, a veritable digital specter, crawling into your internet to talk about books and horror and birds and apples. It’ll be great! And you don’t even have to leave your house. And why would you want to leave your house? THE WORLD IS A HUNGRY MOUTH. Safer instead to come meet me on the plains of 1s and 0s, yes? Yes.

The especially cool news is, I’ll be appearing at these bookstores with a handful of very wonderful authors, truly some of my favorite writers and people, so I expect that the ensuing conversations will be a gosh-dang monkey-fridgin’ delight.

Here is that schedule (also viewable in the above graphic) —

July 20th, 7pm EST, in conversation with Aaron Mahnke, as part of a joint bookstore event between three PA bookstores: The Doylestown Bookshop, Let’s Play Books, and the Midtown Scholar. (If you want signed, personalized books, then buy from one of these stores, if you please.) Register for that event here.

July 21st, 7pm EST, chatting with Paul Tremblay for The Strand / Metaverse NYCC, NYC. Register for that event here.

July 22nd, 6pm EST, conversing with Stephen Graham Jones for The Fountain Bookstore, in Richmond, VA. Register for that event here.

July 23rd, 7:30pm EST, hanging out with Delilah S. Dawson for the University Bookstore, in Seattle, WA. Details here.

July 28th, 8PM EST, visiting with Kiersten White for Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee, WI. Register for the event here.

And finally, July 29th, it’s me and Cassandra Khaw, chatting at Powell’s Books in Portland, OR. Register here.

Obviously, I ask that if you partake in an event, you try to buy a book from the hosting bookstore! (They should all have signed copies available, with a number of signed bookplates at each.) They are kind enough to run these and provide the infrastructure and the support, and of course bookstores are a mighty wonderful part of the BOOK ECOSYSTEM. If you like books and authors and stories, then supporting an independent bookstore is an essential component. I also hope you’ll consider buying the books of the conversing authors, all of whom are amazing goddamn authors and whose books demand your eyeballs. You will be rewarded with excellence.

And most of them will ship books right to you.

As to whether or not I’ll be doing any in-person events, it’s not likely for this specific release window, given that things are still up in the air — lots of airline cancellations, plus the rise of the delta variant, plus the differences in COVID numbers and protocol state to state, makes that tricky. But, I’m not averse to doing an in-person event at some point soon, either, because I am a vaccinated human* who is happy to meet other vaccinated humans! If I have such an event where we may orbit one another’s flesh sacks in three-dimensional space, I will surely put it here on this blog. So I remind folks that subscribing is always a good idea, if you’ve not done that.

I’m also doing a virtual chat at the Jacksonville Public Library this week — 6/23. You can find details for that event here.

Hope you’ll check out the book! If you don’t, I die!

MORE AS I KNOW IT.

*sack of wizard-cursed apples

A family of luck poachers receives a phone call that sets them off in the hopes of reversing their bad fortune. At a singles mixer for chemical elements, a luminous-yet-jaded Neon looks for love, or at least a one-night exothermic reaction. When blue skies turn gray and the daikaiju siren blares, the ten-year-old daughter of the local weatherman discovers her destiny. And washed-up evildoers live out their meaningless lives at a retirement home for villains—you never know when someone might turn the swimming pool into a shark pit, or bring a death ray to Taco Tuesday.

From the imagination of S.G. Browne comes a collection of fourteen short stories of downtrodden luck poachers, lovelorn chemical elements, obsolete villains, disillusioned children, trademarked teenagers, outcast reindeer, victimized zombies, and time-traveling alcoholics—many of them lost and searching for answers. Some of them find what they’re looking for, while one or two discover that childhood dreams can come true.

***

There’s A Leprechaun Sanctuary In Carlingford, Ireland

Carlingford is a small coastal village in northeast Ireland, about an hour south of Belfast. Among other things, Carlingford is known for its oyster farms, medieval buildings, and leprechaun sanctuary. That’s right. A leprechaun sanctuary.

You can learn all sorts of interesting (and often useless) information when you write a short story about the pandemic, incorporate the internet meme “The earth is healing, nature is returning” into your story, and end up reading a bunch of articles about mythological creatures and going down the proverbial research rabbit hole.

The genesis for the leprechaun sanctuary started back in 1989 when P.J. O’Hare, a local pub owner, claimed he found evidence of a leprechaun after hearing a scream near the wishing well on Slieve Foye, the mountain that overlooks Carlingford. When the pub owner investigated, he found small bones, a tiny green jacket and pants, and a handful of gold coins surrounded by what appeared to be scorched earth. I have no idea if there were any other witnesses. But the clothes are apparently on display at PJs Pub in Carlingford.

The discovery sparked The Carlingford National Leprechaun Hunt on Slieve Foye, with thousands descending on the mountain to search for leprechauns. While many of the locals embraced the surge in visitors and the increased revenue it brought to Carlingford, they wanted to make sure to protect the little people and their habitat, as it was believed that 236 leprechauns lived in the caverns of the mountain. I have no idea why or how they arrived at 236 rather than a nice round estimate like 250. I’m just the messenger.

Finally, in 2009, twenty years after the discovery of the leprechaun’s remains, the European Union granted official heritage status to the leprechauns who lived in the caverns of Slieve Foye, declaring the mountain and all of its inhabitants, animals, and flora a designated area of protection under the EU’s Habitats Directive.

So who wants to go to Carlingford?

Chlorine & Fluorine Are Promiscuous Elements

I received a C in my freshman college chemistry class. I aced high school chemistry and was a straight-A student going all the way back to 1^st grade. So getting a C during my first semester at college came as somewhat of a shock. It probably had something to do with the fact that in high school, I wasn’t staying up late three nights a week playing drinking games in my dorm room. It didn’t help that my chemistry class was at eight in the morning on Friday and Thursday night was a big party night.

I didn’t retain a lot of information from my college chemistry class. Go figure. But even had I not been hungover in class on a regular basis, I’m pretty sure my college chemistry professor never mentioned how chlorine and fluorine are two of the more promiscuous elements of the periodic table.

Fluorine has formed compound bonds with nearly all of the other elements. Like all halogens, Fluorine only has nine electrons. In periodic table parlance, she’s one electron shy of a full shell. Not to mention she’s highly toxic. So caveat emptor. Chlorine, meanwhile, has, at one time or another, hooked up with nearly all of the other elements, which is surprising considering he’s toxic, gassy, and irritating. But who am I to judge?

When it comes to chemical promiscuity, Hydrogen isn’t much better. It doesn’t matter if you’re noble or poor, stable or monoatomic. If you’re ionizing, Hydrogen is synthesizing. So if you’re looking for a serious relationship, he’s not exactly husband material. Carbon, meanwhile, has two stable naturally occurring isotopes and is capable of forming multiple stable covalent bonds, which makes him more of an ideal candidate for a long-term relationship. Although when it comes to monogamy, he’s not exactly a paragon of virtue, having formed more compounds than any other element.

If you’re not interested in making a commitment or forming any kind of lasting bond, there are plenty of chemical elements who are just looking for a one-night exothermic reaction. But it’s probably best to avoid Technetium and Promethium, since neither one of them has any stable isotopes. The last thing you want is a stalker.

I think it’s safe to say that most of the elements on the periodic table tend to be polyamorous or at least prefer to be in open relationships. I also think it’s safe to say that when it came to writing a short story about a weekly singles mixer for chemical elements, I learned a lot more about chemistry than I did in high school or college.

I Enjoyed Exploring My Feminine Side

Prior to writing the majority of the fourteen stories that comprise LOST CREATURES, I wrote nine novels, one novella, and four-dozen or so short stories. I don’t mention this to boast or humble brag, because there are countless writers who have written and published far more stories and novels than I’ve ever imagined. I mention my writing history to emphasize that although my novels and many of my short stories have featured prominent female characters, none of those characters played the role of the main protagonist. So the majority of my writing was male-centered and told from the male POV, which, over the past two decades, has been almost exclusively in the 1^st person.

Then I was introduced to the short story collections of Karen Russell and Kelly Link.

Not that I hadn’t read books or stories written by female authors before, but none of them had inspired or compelled me to shift my perspective when it came to my characters and how I wanted to tell my stories or who I wanted to tell them. Not to mention the type of stories I wanted to tell. It brought more balance to my writing and I found myself exploring ideas and stories and characters that I never would have considered writing about before because they wouldn’t have worked as well, or at all, when told from a male POV.

So while half of the stories in LOST CREATURES have a male protagonist, the other half are told from the POV of a female—including a ten-year old Japanese girl concerned about daikaiju ruining her weekend plans, a college-aged zombie taking remedial English classes, and a mother reminiscing about the pet centaurs she raised as a child. Most of the stories are told in the 1^st person POV, which allowed me to spend a lot of time in the female perspective, seeing the story and the world through a different set of eyes than I had so often told most of my stories. And these stories turned out to be some of my favorite stories I’ve ever written.

By the way, if you’ve never read anything by Karen Russell or Kelly Link, I highly recommend it.

Writing Short Stories Helps Me To Find My Happy Place

The thing they don’t tell you about being a writer is that there are times when it can become a grind, sucking all of the joy out of the creative process. Not that writing is always fun. The business side can be a time suck when all you want to do is sit down and write. But sometimes it’s a challenge to be creative, to write words that you’re happy with, to craft sentences and paragraphs and scenes that make you think, “This is what I was meant to do. This is my jam.”

That’s the sweet spot that writers look to hit. And when we’re lucky, we hit it. But other times it can be tedious, like when you can’t figure out how to fill a plot hole in your novel or when one of your characters starts doing things that don’t make any sense and you shout at your computer, “What the fuck, Timmy?”

When the story isn’t working no matter how hard you try to make it work, especially when you’re on a deadline and you have to find a way to make it work, that’s when the joy of writing becomes a panic-filled grind. Because if the story isn’t working for you, chances are it’s not going to work for anyone who reads it. And that’s worse than anything Timmy was doing to piss you off.

And then there are the times when you’re not writing to fulfill yourself but in order to fulfill a contractual obligation. It happens more often than you’d think. Sometimes the business of writing becomes more about the business than it does about the writing. And that sucks.

When writing becomes a grind for me, when my novel isn’t working or I find myself writing something for the wrong reasons, I write short stories. They’re my way of exploring ideas that matter to me without having to worry about a deadline or a contract or if my agent or editor will like them. I write them for me. I write them for fun. And I write them without the constraints of expectations about whether or not I can sell them. It would be nice if I could. But that’s not why I’m writing them. I’m writing them for the pure joy of writing. To remind myself that writing can be fun. To remind myself why I started down this path in the first place.

To write stories.

Compiling A Short Story Collection Is Like Being A Literary DJ

Over the years, I’ve made my fair share of mixtapes and am old enough to have made some on actual cassette tapes. I still occasionally make mixtapes on CDs (although you could argue that it’s technically a mix-CD). But I’ve always enjoyed the process of compiling songs and putting them together to create a specific experience for the listener. I even had a brief side gig as a substitute DJ in 1990 while living in Los Angeles, spinning records Friday nights at Alzado’s Restaurant & Bar in West Hollywood. Alzado’s liked their rock and roll on the classic side, which was right up my musical alley. But you still wanted to spin a good mix of tunes that would keep the energy going and the customers happy.

To me, short story collections are like literary playlists and the writer is the DJ, spinning tales to create a rhythm and flow to keep the energy going and the reader engaged. I can’t speak for other writers, but when I compiled LOST CREATURES, I put the stories down in a specific order, moving them around until I found the right flow, with the idea that reading the collection from start to finish would give the reader an experience they wouldn’t get by jumping around from one story to another. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s just not the experience I intended for the reader to have.

So LOST CREATURES is my literary mixtape. My Friday night DJ gig. But instead of spinning songs, I’m spinning stories, trying to create the right mood and rhythm in the hopes that the reader sticks around until last call.

***

S.G. Browne is the author of the novels Breathers, Fated, Lucky Bastard, Big Egos, and Less Than Hero, as well as the short story collection Shooting Monkeys in a Barrel and the heartwarming holiday novella I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus. He’s also the author of The Maiden Poodle, a self-published fairy tale about anthropomorphic cats and dogs suitable for children and adults of all ages. He’s an ice cream connoisseur, Guinness aficionado, cat shelter volunteer, and a sucker for It’s a Wonderful Life. He lives in San Francisco.

SG Browne: Website | Twitter | Instagram

Lost Creatures: Amazon | Kobo | Apple | B&N

I’m so sorry, that post title is terrible. But I am a monster, and so I persist. ANYWAY this is just a quick drop in to let you know that, should you be so inclined, Wanderers is a Kindle Daily Deal today, which winnows the price down to a cozy $3.99. So you can head over there and check it out. Let’s see, what else is going on?

I’ll have The Book of Accidents-related news soon. Blurbs, signed copies, virtual tour.

I’d still like to do an in-person event somewhere, but there remains hesitation, which is understandable!

Pre-ordering books is good for the bookish soul — it helps the bookstores, and it helps li’l ol’ me. It makes sure to signal demand, to make sure there are books on hand and that bookstores order more if necessary. And it just supports the overall book-based ecosystem. Which is nice! You can pre-order The Book of Accidents (July 20th), as well as Dust & Grim (October 5th). The most wonderful place of all to order those books is your local bookstore — or an independent bookstore elsewhere across the country, many of whom indeed will catapult books right to your door.

OKAY BYE. MORE SOON.