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:

Practical, unassuming Jane Shoringfield has done the calculations, and decided that the most secure path forward is this: a husband, in a marriage of convenience, who will allow her to remain independent and occupied with meaningful work. Her first choice, the dashing but reclusive doctor Augustine Lawrence, agrees to her proposal with only one condition: that she must never visit Lindridge Hall, his crumbling family manor outside of town. 

Yet on their wedding night, an accident strands her at his door in a pitch-black rainstorm, and she finds him changed. Gone is the bold, courageous surgeon, and in his place is a terrified, paranoid man—one who cannot tell reality from nightmare, and fears Jane is an apparition, come to haunt him. By morning, Augustine is himself again, but Jane knows something is deeply wrong at Lindridge Hall, and with the man she has so hastily bound her safety to. 

Set in a dark-mirror version of post-war England, Caitlin Starling crafts a new kind of gothic horror from the bones of the beloved canon. This Crimson Peak-inspired story assembles, then upends, every expectation set in place by Shirley Jackson and Rebecca, and will leave readers shaken, desperate to begin again as soon as they are finished.

Abdominal surgery Calls To Me, and I don’t know why

The Death of Jane Lawrence makes book number two in which there is an early plot-central colostomy. (The first, of course, is Gyre’s suit hookup in The Luminous Dead.) It wasn’t always that way; in the first version of the book, it was a very standard, run-of-the-mill horrifying leg amputation, a Victorian surgical specialty that has the benefit of not risking serious death in a time period that is only just discovering antiseptic technique.

But then revisions happened, and I needed to make the injury that caused the surgery weird, and, well, now you’ve got a klein bottle for a large intestine and you need a colostomy if you’re going to live.

(And then I added five more abdominal surgeries to the book, and I only realized the extent of the infestation when I was writing up content warnings.)

Look. I don’t know why I’m so obsessed with rerouting bowels and excising eldritch lumps. Something about the centrality of it, maybe? How inherently violating it is? Maybe how, after, you have to deal with a fundamental change to how you live?

It did grant me the absolutely amazing experience of consulting with an ER doctor in the family about possible complications and medical limitations of the setting, in which said doctor coined the phrase “location of the magical insult”.

What I forgive in a character is not necessarily what readers forgive in a character.

In the very first draft of The Death of Jane Lawrence, Jane was, perhaps, a little too forgiving to her new husband. Secrets? Well, it’s reasonable not to dump your trauma onto your new wife! Gaslighting? He was only trying to insulate her from his problems! Delusional and uncalled for attempted surgery? He was just scared!

You can imagine how this made my critique partners tear their hair out. My goal had been to make Jane’s husband sympathetic, but in belaboring his motivations, the book became me making excuses and crying, Oh, he’s not that bad! (He was. He still is. This is a gothic we’re talking about.) It turned out that the way to actually make him sympathetic (or at least engaging) was to drop his POV, stop justifying – and to let Jane react with a little less acceptance and a lot more frustration.

This is why readers are so important at every stage of the process: what you take away from your own writing is not what other people will take away from it, and it can sometimes be hard to anticipate where the differences are.

(Note: Sometimes the mismatch is not actually a problem. There is a point near the end of the book, in which Jane does something which I found not only reasonable, but rather romantic.

My editor had to remind me that it was, in fact, horrifying. And since this is a horror novel, that’s a good thing.)

Cocaine is a hell of a drug.

A quick disclaimer: I’m pretty sure that if I am the last person who should ever take cocaine, for the sake of myself and everybody who has to deal with me.

But cocaine was a standard part of the Victorian pharmacopeia, and what better tool is there when you need to be functional after long nights without sleep thanks to your haunted mansion or, moreover, when you absolutely need to stay awake for several days straight for a touch of ritual magic?

It was entirely reasonable to give my characters cocaine. But cocaine, plus the close third person perspective the book is written in, plus the already constantly escalating and spiraling weirdness of the plot turned into something perfectly, wonderfully terrible. Suddenly, Jane, who is by any measure confident and a little outside the norms of general behavior, was taking even bigger risks.

The trick, of course, is to make each decision feel natural; being able to immediately dismiss it as, “Oh, our lead is now on drugs,” cheapens the impact. That’s where the perspective comes in: Jane’s concept of what she’s doing is entirely medical and practical, and the moment of dosing herself does not immediately precede her questionable cocaine decisions. There’s a delay, long enough and subtle enough that Jane, and therefore the narrative, can’t connect the dots. An attentive reader can, of course, but the mismatch between reader knowledge and narrative produces that necessary horror ingredient: dread.

Go weirder.

The Death of Jane Lawrence, for all its classic trappings, is a completely bonkers little book. (Did the cocaine tip you off? What if I tell you that Jane’s understanding of magic is based in calculus?) It didn’t start that way, though. In earlier drafts, I kept things simple and easy to explain, my few flourishes constrained to what exactly are ghosts in this world? and okay, what’s another gnarly medical thing I can add here?

That made for a nice book. But I just stopped worrying so much, it could be so much better.

Two things got in the way of that, at first. One: marketability. Money is good. Money is a necessary component of why I write. And writing something weird makes it less likely to sell, right? Turns out, that’s not exactly true. If The Luminous Dead’s relative success taught me anything, it’s that, if you can get the weird on the shelves, it sticks with people. If you just let your weird brain weasels out to play, and show them off at the best angles, people like that. They pay you money. They want more!

Which brings me to the second roadblock: I have spent my whole life trying not to be so weird. My brain occasionally goes way too hard in directions that the people I meet in my day to day life don’t get (or, worse, are disgusted by). That made trying to tap into that weird a very scary, vulnerable process. It wasn’t even that I looked at what I knew I wanted to do and went, “No, that’s scary, can’t do that.” I had buried some of this down so deep that I had forgotten what I wanted. It took a lot of excavating to find it again.

Absolutely worth it, but a bitch of an exercise.

Revisions make the heart grow fonder.

There have been a lot of iterations of this book. There have been at least two ground-up rewrites, maybe three, and a whole lot of tweaking at each step. It was one of the most frustrating experiences of my creative life: here was a book that I loved, beyond all reason, and it wasn’t right, and wasn’t right, and still wasn’t right. The things I loved about it just weren’t translating to my early readers, and I spent years tearing it apart and putting it back together, trying to find what was going wrong.

Over time, I made everything weirder, and made Jane take bigger risks, and just got loud about the parts that I enjoyed most. I let them take up more page count. I wallowed around in them, because, let’s face it – if I never fixed the book, I at least wanted to enjoy some of that failure. And if I wasn’t having fun, then what was the point of beating my head into a wall?

There were dark times, of course, but by the time we got to the final draft, I was still having fun. I was having more fun, actually. I wanted to yell about the book even louder, to more people, for longer. The story that started The Death of Jane Lawrence was good! But where we’ve ended up?

Well, that’s magical.

***

Caitlin Starling is an award-winning writer of horror-tinged speculative fiction. Her novel The Luminous Dead won the LOHF Best Debut award, and was nominated for both a Locus and a Bram Stoker award. Her other works include Yellow Jessamine and a novella in Vampire: The Masquerade: Walk Among Us. Her nonfiction has appeared in Nightmare and Uncanny. Caitlin also works in narrative design, and has been paid to invent body parts. Find her work at www.caitlinstarling.com and follow her at @see_starling on Twitter.

Caitlin Starling: Website | Twitter

The Death of Jane Lawrence: Indiebound | Powells | Bookshop.org | B&N | Amazon

A paranormal romantic comedy at the (possible) end of the world.

All Callie wanted was a quiet weekend with her best friend. She promised her mom she could handle running her family’s escape room business while her mom is out of town. Instead a Satanic cult shows up, claiming that the prop spell book in one of the rooms is the real deal, and they need it to summon the right hand of the devil. Naturally they take Callie and her friend, Mag, along with them. But when the summoning reveals a handsome demon in a leather jacket named Luke who offers to help Callie stop the cult from destroying the world, her night goes from weird to completely strange.

As the group tries to stay one step ahead of the cult, Callie finds herself drawn to the annoying (and annoyingly handsome) Luke. But what Callie doesn’t know is that Luke is none other than Luke Morningstar, Prince of Hell and son of the Devil himself. Callie never had time for love, and with the apocalypse coming closer, is there room for romance when all hell’s about to break loose?

From New York Times bestselling author Gwenda Bond, Not Your Average Hot Guy is a hilarious romantic comedy about two people falling in love, while the fate of the world rests on their shoulders.

Sometimes you have to get away from your desk.

Not Your Average Hot Guy has what I think is an interesting origin story. Winters are not my favorite. All those gray days just drag me down, and every year it seems worse (yes, I have the SAD light!). So I was already looking forward to just getting out of the house and driving down to Tennessee for a book festival by March–in this case the Southeastern Young Adult Book Festival (SE-YA for short), organized by the Four Librarians of the Apocalypse (this should’ve been my first hint). I wanted to do stuff with my friends! Fun things! So I switched into activities director mode, which I’m occasionally wont to do.

For instance, one night we went to play ski-ball at Chuck E. Cheese. I noticed there was an escape room business in the strip mall bordering the hotel we were all at. Over drinks that night, I found a group willing to give it a try and booked us a reservation. Which booked wrong! I panicked and called in the morning. They were supposed to be closing early for a wedding, but the lovely people at the business agreed they could make it work during the late afternoon for us. Whew, without that escape room trip, this book probably would never have existed.

We did a Baker Street/Sherlock Holmes-themed room with great effects. It was the perfect mix of people and we escaped within the allotted time. There was even a wonderful dog hanging out behind the desk.

On the drive back home, my brain spun out almost this entire book. I love writing about family businesses, and I wondered what it would be like if your family ran an escape room. And what if you accidentally put a real grimoire in a room? And also, what if it summoned a devil, and what if instead of the usual it was the devil’s son and that’s a whole different kind of family business…. AND what if it was a rom-com? When I got home, I sat back down at my desk and tweeted this, and then wrote what would stay the first few pages. Beginnings are usually impossibly hard for me. Sometimes you need to have a little adventure.

When you’re truly excited about an idea, ignore the reasons you shouldn’t write it.

On paper, in 2017, absolutely no one would’ve suggested I write this book. A rom-com with paranormal elements? Paranormal was dead, they said (which is never true, by the way; all genres are undead and everything in publishing cycles). Certainly, on paper, paranormal romance would be a hard sell. Also? A book with all these good vs. evil elements? A rom-com set during a (possible) apocalypse? I kept it to myself for awhile, but it fell out of my brain onto the page. I was having so much fun writing it, even while it was a difficult challenge for reasons I’ll discuss later in the list. I wasn’t initially sure if it was YA or for adults (it’s for adults, but has been deemed crossover, as the characters are early 20s).

When I showed a portion to my agent, I expected her to love it too, and she did! But she had a lot of questions. And advised that I needed to write the whole thing, not just a proposal. She was most certainly correct, but later admitted that she usually hates these kind of god/devil sorts of books. But she ended up loving this one when it was done, which is why she made that admission (whew). Still, I had to keep putting it aside to write other things, but then I’d come back to it. I was not at all confident anyone would like this book, let alone want to buy it.

But I decided not to care. And I kept coming back to the page. There’s a lot of me in this book, especially my sense of humor. I’ve never been the sort of writer who makes decisions based on anything other than the story that feels like I want to tell it and which is the most me. Even when I’m writing IP (intellectual property), like Stranger Things or Lois Lane, it has to be a good fit that I can put my voice into and feel like I’m bringing something with me.

Responses to this book on submission were almost universally positive, but a lot of people didn’t know what to do with it. I was convinced all along I’d have to make it less weird. I’m so happy it found first Tiffany Shelton, and then Jennie Conway, at St. Martin’s, who have supported this book like whoa, along with everyone else who worked on it there (you know who you are, but I’m going to shout you out anyway, because you don’t get enough recognition–Kerri Resnick for the cover direction and design, Mary Moates and Natalie Figueroa from publicity, Erica Martirano and Kejana Ayala on the marketing side). And during a pandemic.

I could’ve easily talked myself or let myself be talked out of writing this book–there’s a risk as you get further in a writing career to believe you somehow understand publishing and think maybe if you just did this, you’d get where you want to go. But publishing will always be unpredictable. That is the only predictable thing. Sure, be strategic, but your voice and what interests you, the weird way you combine all the art that made you, the you part of your books, all that is the only thing no one else can bring to the table. You have to trust it.

Comedy is hard.

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” It’s so good, it’s no wonder it’s an iconic quote, despite the fact its origin and wording are difficult to source. I think one of the reasons besides other work the first draft of this took so long to complete is because it is a comedic novel. Yes, it’s right there in the rom-com part, and I wanted to make sure the book was funny… But comedy is hard. It’s delicate and intricate and must feel organic and it’s also extremely personal. I’ll explain.

I honestly don’t think I’d have been brave enough to write straight-up comedy until this point in my writing journey. In person, I like to think I’m funny (oh god, no one who thinks that is funny, but let’s set that aside–let’s say, I like to laugh, and I like to make other people laugh, and I think life is generally absurd and, even when it’s actually horrible, I tend to deal with it with humor, which is something my family always did too). In fact, one of my early mentors in grad school when I decided to start writing novels said, “This character pushes people away with humor right before things get real.” And I was like, “THIS ATTACK ON ME IS UNWARRANTED. But possibly accurate.” The thing is, though, humor is actually incredibly revealing and personal.

To put what you think is funny on the page is a different kind of vulnerability. Because senses of humor are very particular and personal. While, in general, people not liking your books sucks, but doesn’t equal a rejection of you, people rejecting your sense of humor…well, it kind of does feel that way. So, even more than on a craft level, which is incredibly tricky, it’s also nerve-wracking to write funny. As much or more so than entering a new, much-beloved genre…

You will end up writing the thing you don’t think you’ll ever write or have an interesting take on.

Almost anyone who knows me well will tell you I’ve long been obsessed with comedy and particularly the classic screwball rom-coms of the 1930s and ‘40s, but also modern rom-com. Much as I used to be obsessed with circus novels and the circus itself, but never thought I’d write a circus book, because what new did I have to add? Then I started Girl on a Wire, and then it became a whole circus series. So, yes, I’ve written romantic novels with humor in them–certainly the Lois Lane books fit–but I never really thought I’d get to write rom-coms. Particularly not with a kind of classic screwball sensibility mashed up with all the mythological and/or supernatural/occult stuff I love and romance.

And then, of course, just like with Girl on a Wire, I got hit by that lightning idea and it was happening.

Truth is, most of us have genres or things we’re low-key or major-key obsessed with, and often it’s those that will mug you. They’re deep in your subconscious. I love so many things about romantic comedy. Banter. Lightning wit. Two people who challenge and make each other better versions of themselves. Sheer absurd situations, and moments that will change the characters’ lives, and laughter. Some of my favorite comedic writing ever can be found in Preston Sturges’ scripts. When Christopher, my husband and sometime writing partner, and I first met and started dating, he got me a shooting script for The Palm Beach Story for my birthday (along with a fancy copy of the play Medea–I CONTAIN MULTITUDES). I’m obsessed with the books of Connie Willis, particularly the comedies. And with so many rom-coms I can’t begin to list them.

But I never thought I’d write an honest-to-god rom-com…. Because writer brain reasons. And yet, now that I have and still am, I have so many ideas for more. I love this genre deeply, and all the things it lets us explore. I love how science fiction and fantasy (and romance itself) allows us to replicate the constraints in fiction that made all the classic rom-coms with their class dynamics and other-reasons-not-to-be-together classic rom-coms. I used to argue with people about how SFF could be uniquely positioned to do this in a certain way, and, duh, now I’m writing them and hopefully the books make the argument better than I ever could

Romance is a genre for joy.

We have this persistent myth in our culture that things that are tragic or depressing or even just serious or cynical or whatever are somehow wiser and more important and more difficult to pull off. That they are more intrinsically valuable, and have more to say about life. Same problem often shows up with shows or stories that explore the complications of good people–Ted Lasso and Superman haters, I’m looking at you.

I read all over the map, and reading romance specifically has been a master class for me as a writer on emotional vulnerability and arcs. I snuck plenty of romance as a teen, but I started reading romance in a real way about ten years ago, though I’d already been reading urban fantasy with heavy romantic threads before that, and it quickly became a part of my reading diet. During the pandemic, it’s what kept me going. I wanted to laugh. I wanted the safe space of a book that ends with the closure of a happy for now or happy ever after. Those borders can allow you to take any emotional journey that exists. Romance is as varied as any other genre, in terms of mood and types of stories, and quality of writing. But there is always that sense that the author cares about you and your experience while reading. There is the sense that the book is a gift for you, the reader.

That’s very much how I approached writing this book. It’s the apocalypse, but it’s a fun apocalypse. I think we’ve all had enough of the other kind in reality at the moment (not that I don’t love a good fraught post-apocalyptic–like my host’s Wanderers, for instance).

But romance is–like YA–still much-maligned and looked down on because of its perceived status as being primarily for and about women, and, by extension, somehow disposable and frivolous. Imagine that. There are still people who act like romance and romance writers and readers have cooties. Guess what? COOTIES ARE FAKE. And romance readers and writers are smart as fuck.

Which is what makes it such a joy to write for them, for you. I hope you all dig this book, and its sequel, out next spring! I hope that they bring you joy. Many thanks to Chuck for letting me blather about all this here.

***

Gwenda Bond is the New York Times bestselling author of many novels, including the first official Stranger Things novel, Suspicious Minds. She also clearly escaped from a classic screwball romantic comedy. Not Your Average Hot Guy (out now!) and The Date from Hell (April 2022!) are her first rom-coms for adults. She lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband, author Christopher Rowe, and a veritable zoo of adorable doggos and queenly cats. Visit her online at www.gwendabond.com or @gwenda on Twitter.

Gwenda Bond: Website | Twitter

Not Your Average Hot Guy: Bookshop | Indiebound | B&N | Amazon