EVERYTHING’S FOR HIRE. EVEN MAGIC.

If you need something done, Cloke’s one of the best; a mercenary with some unusual talents and an attitude to match.But when she’s hired by a virtual construct to destroy the other copies of himself, and the down payment is a new magical skill, she knows this job is going to be a league harder than anything she’s ever done.

***

Min/Maxing & Gaming Forums Work For Magic Too

I’m going to date myself immediately by admitting that the Atari 2600 was my first video game console. Since then, like many people that love video games, I’ve scoured the Internet for tips to get an edge in some of the games I play. This is known as “min/maxing” to some. In role-playing game terms for video games, this refers to the practice minimizing weaknesses while maximizing strengths.

In some cases, this also means finding exploits, glitches, or techniques that the game developers had never originally intended, but work out amazingly well if you’re willing to take the low road. I found I had the most fun with deploying magic into a cyberpunk world by thinking of it in those terms. Magic could have its intended functions, like hurling a fireball at an enemy, but when you’ve got it existing in a world with neural simulation and near-earth orbital space stations, there’s a lot of other stuff you can do with it too.

So I took the gamer approach to some of the magic applications, looking at particular combinations and applications. What happens when technology and magic interact, and now you’ve got new “rulesets” interacting with other rulesets? How can you break this? Is there an exploit you can use where one set of rules normally says something is impossible, but another can make it happen?

In the same way that people used unorthodox means to cheat in games, defeat copy protection on digital media, or just find ways to game the system, I tried putting magic and technology in the same room with some common goals to see how the two would fight or work together to achieve that goal.

I Think I’m A Carbon Fanboy

It’s not unusual for writers to go down the rabbit hole of research when it comes to novels. People writing historical fiction need to get those details right, and unless you’re already a master of quantum physics, engineering, rocketry, cybernetics, or programming, you’re doing to have to dig deep into a lot of areas if for some types of science fiction.

So for me, that ended up being a lot of materials research and getting embarrassingly excited about the future of carbon compounds. All the variants, like graphene, inorganic fullerenes, carbon fiber… it’s just amazing stuff. Who would have thought that the stuff you could theoretically collect from pencil shavings if you were patient enough was a miracle material? I’m still a little stunned that if I wanted some of the best combat armor in the world, all I’d need is a pocket knife, a couple of decades and several metric tons of pencils to get the raw material I’d need to survive a direct shot from gunfire.

Naïve Characters Don’t Have To Be Average

I think I first heard the term “naïve character” while listening to an interview with William Gibson. The naïve character is a very handy device in genre fiction. This is the person that is a stand-in newbie for the reader, and gets to ask all the questions the reader has like “What’s that? Who’s that? That thing the Evil Queen just said that made everyone gasp, what does that mean? How does your tech/magic/psychic eggplant work?”

In some cases, the naïve character is also the protagonist, so there’s a certain amount of “averageness” that’s built in to make sure this person is relatable. Neo in The Matrix is a naïve character who constantly repeats, “I have SO many questions.” Ellen Page, as Ariadne in the movie Inception, is another good example.

For The Chimera Code, I was already tossing readers neck first into an existing cyberpunk future, which would have been disorienting enough on its own. But then magic had been integrated into that world a few generations prior, so they were already getting the hang of this, and it made for some odd intersections of culture and commerce. That’s a lot to take in, and so I knew that functionally, I’d get a lot more room maneuver by having my naïve character to ask Cloke all the questions that needed asking.

But I didn’t want someone average and relatable in a world already as weird as this. Enter Zee, the nonbinary hacker. Zee ended up being so interesting that an automatic promotion to protagonist status became unavoidable. What once was strictly Cloke’s show became the Cloke & Zee act, and the fact that Zee had an agenda, a background, and all kinds of issues to deal with became a major highlight of writing. Zee was no longer just there to say stuff like, “Explain to me how this magic stuff works in today’s global economy,” although that stuff gets asked. Zee had agency, goals, and things that needed doing. So my naïve character ended up being anything but average, and in some cases, totally stole the show.

The Abyss Is Liberating

This novel is my debut, but it’s not my first book. It’s actually my sixth. I’d had the idea for this book forever—or at least since the 1990s—but I kept putting off writing it. At the time, I was really attracted to the idea of writing a cyberpunk book, but William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer and Godfather of the entire cyberpunk genre, was my gold standard. I wasn’t sure I could live up to the bar he’d established.

So over the years, I wrote a lot of other books instead, with fantastical elements in familiar settings. Urban fantasy was my way of getting my feet wet with weird shit, without having to create all of it from the ground up. I still love those books, and my very first novel still holds a special place in my heart, but none of them got published. They all helped me to find my voice, though.

So after many years of unsuccessfully trying to get a book in print, I stared down the barrel of considering that it might be time to kill the dream. I figured if I was going to quit, I might as well make my last book the one I really wanted to write. With that idea of making a kamikaze jump off a cliff, I finally committed The Chimera Code to the page. Believing that it was the last book I was ever going to write made a pretty big difference to how I approached it.

Does this mean I think I hit the bar I set for myself with regards to the brutal, beautiful, dense prose of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy? I probably didn’t. But now I was willing to at least try for it. I was willing to finally make my own world from the ground up, instead of putting small bits and pieces of it in an established framework. And I was willing to take all the crazy moments I’d seen in comics, games, movies, and even anime, in addition to novels, and just throw them all into this one book. It was going to be my last book. May as well go out in style.

And now, of course, it’s not my last book, at least not for now. So I guess sometimes when you set your sights on ending with a bang, that’s really just the precursor to even louder things.

There Is No Shame In Not Drawing From The Classics

As a Generation X nerd, I did my time as a kid in the library looking at the giants of the SF genre, so I read my Clarke, my Asimov, my Heinlein, and of course, my Herbert. But I was also utterly blown away by things that, at the time, weren’t classics, like the upstart William Gibson, and Neuromancer novel.

More to the point, though, as a Gen X kid, I was also there when the damn broke, and all kinds of other non-SF-book influences came to the fore. Marvel’s Dark Phoenix saga in comics? Blew my mind. Blade Runner, Aliens, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn? Will be with me forever. The first bootleg, 12^th generation copies of Japanese cartoons that people were calling “anime”? I devoured Akira, Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind, Bubblegum Crisis and so much more. And video games were like falling through the wardrobe into Narnia. You could do stuff here! You could interact! I got the Babel Fish in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure! What manner of sorcery was this?!

That’s all my way of saying that when I’m writing something now, I’m just as likely to pull from Haikyuu!!, a volleyball sports anime, as I am from Horizon: Zero Dawn, or Blade Runner 2049. It’s a much bigger world now, and while I still adore the stuff, I find in books today and will happily lose myself in the worlds of Charlie Jane Anders, or N.K. Jemisin, or even go back to Asimov, Clarke, or Gibson, I’m not letting them be the sole influences on what ends up on my page.

***

Over the years, Wayne Santos has written copy for advertising agencies, scripts for television, and articles for magazines. He’s lived in Canada, Thailand and Singapore, traveling to many countries around South East Asia. His first love has always been science fiction and fantasy, and while he regularly engaged with it in novels, comics, anime and video games, it wasn’t until 1996, with his first short story in the Canadian speculative fiction magazine On Spec that he aimed towards becoming a novelist. He now lives in Canada, in Hamilton, ON with his wife. When he’s not writing, he is likely to be found reading, playing video games, watching anime, or trying to calm his cat down.

Wayne Santos: Website

The Chimera Code: eBook

And so we continue with another round of effervescent microblogs, which are too big to be tweets, too small to be blogs, so they’re mostly just here, a meal of content appetizers.

There’s a We Bare Bears movie and you need to watch it. I know, I know. You’re like, “But Chuck, why begin your post with something so controversial, so important?” And yet, you joke, but it kinda is? We Bare Bears has always been a wonderful cartoon, but as I understand it, Daniel Chong intended for the series all along to be a goofy bear-shaped analog to his experience as an Asian-American, touching on (if not explicitly and not exclusively) a non-white and immigrant angle for the bears. Well, the movie definitely puts that into sharp focus — without giving too much away, it (in its adorable way) looks at family separation, border camps, border crossings, bigotry, and the like. And yet, it’s still fun and cute and weird and I’m sad the show is now over. Because it’s really great.

If you also need something that feels both very escapist and very now? Then look no further than Palm Springs, the Andy Samberg / Cristin Milioti time-loop movie. Do not accept any spoilers going in — just turn it on and watch it. It’s like an acid-trip hangover version of Groundhog Day.

The greatest trick as an artist right now is making something I think that is both escapist and topical. That’s a gift if you can pull it off. You certainly aren’t required to — I don’t mean it as a mandate. I only mean, both talking about The Now while also having fiction that feels like The Way Out is a masterful slalom. It’s the narrative epitome of “spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” I think some of the best fiction, particularly in genre, does exactly this.

No, I haven’t seen The Old Guard yet. But I’m excited to?

Paul Tremblay is still a monster. I did however finish Survivor Song and boy howdy that Paul Tremblay continues to know how to make you breathlessly descend into his monstrous playground where you excitedly run up to him and he stabs you in the heart with a knife made from the bones of one of your pets. He’s a bad person made all the more evil by the fact he’s so damn good at this. One of the best horror writers around. Also, rabies even without super-sizing it, is fucking scary. Imagine what he does with it. You’re not imagining hard enough.

The election is now single-digits away. It’s 98 days, I think. I said this to my wife this morning and her response was, “It’s like when the Super Mario Brothers music gets faster and faster and everything gets more and more dangerous.” Which uhhh. Y’know. Yeah.

It’s hard to know what the fascist federal troops thing is all about. I mean, it’s obviously about a lot of things — bigotry, control, fascism under the guise of patriotism, and most likely, just people getting paid. I just don’t know the endgame of it. I have a hard time believing it’s popular for anyone other than the most reduced turdsauce that is Trump’s Base. Though maybe I underestimate Americans in general? It just seems, during an already-botched coronavirus response, it’s amazing to see someone continue to try to divide the country before a major election. Unless he thinks this is his ticket to not having to have that election. No matter how you shake it, it’s fucked up. But I’d also argue it’s not working. I hope that it’s dinosaurs squawking at a meteor. But it could also be the meteor.

Speaking of that old coronavirus… haha, what a goddamn fuckshow. I mean, it just amazes me at this point that there are people living full, unfrightened lives in this bullshit. It makes me feel like I’m on crazy pills. I mean, we’re still pretty locked down? Loosened up a little bit, where able, but generally we don’t go many places, no restaurants, no gatherings, no vacations. Masked up all the time if we do go out, social distanced, too. But there are people who just gotta do the dumb shit they gotta do. They gotta have XYZ vacation, they gotta go to this restaurant, they gotta put their kids in sports, and it’s all — like, couldja just cool it? A not-unreasomable percentage of new cases in our county (rising once again) are from Pennsylvanians who just had to go to Myrtle Beach, because if they didn’t go there, they’d just die. Meanwhile, we maybe had a shot to control this. We locked down already. And it was all for… nothing, really. Not for shit. Because we’re a nation with oppositional defiant disorder.

Of course, the real breakdown isn’t just in selfish Americans. I mean, it is in the sense that at the individual level, there are people who are like LOL BUT I NEED BASEBALL AND BARBECUES P.S. THE VIRUS IS FAKE, but the real failure is in leadership. We’re all getting salty at governors and school admins for either not opening up enough or offering too limited options, and people are concerned about working from home or not working from home and what their kids will do — but all this is because we have a gormless narcissist fuckwit at the helm, one surrounded by a gaggle of vampiric bleach-white Skeksis happy to urge him to deeper and deeper lows. There’s no safety net to catch anybody, so instead all they do is keep throwing people into the wood chipper. Your kids aren’t going back to school because of education and their need for it, no matter how much they claim it is — they’re going back to school to feed the economy. Of course, throw enough of them in there, and that machine will break down anyway, and the economic damage won’t simply be a slower machine. It’ll just break. And when it breaks, that’s when it crashes.

Think of it like running on a busted leg. You pull a hamstring or something, you just have to take it easy. You can walk, but you can’t run, much as you want to. But if you try to run, you won’t just keep the injury — you’ll aggravate it. Make it worse. Maybe make it permanent.

I’ve said all this before, haven’t I? Person, woman, man, camera, TV. There are four lights.

Summer Camp Island is nice. So is Infinity Train. Cartoons are good. Anybody who tells you they’re not hasn’t watched Avatar: The Last Airbender. Did I mention we got HBO Max?

HBO To The Max, Dude. It’s both a really great service and a shitty one. Can’t get it on Roku, which sucks. It has a variety of shows, but sometimes only a season of that show? Like with so many streaming services, what it offers is often frustratingly incomplete. And it’s not 4k yet, either, I don’t think? Oh! But I’m enjoying Perry Mason, though jesus fuck it’s dark.

Game on. The newest Superhot is pretty bad-ass. The Oculus Quest is fun, and even more immersive now that the hand-and-finger tracking works. (Meaning, no controllers necessary.) What’s a comfort video game for you? One you return to again and again? I’m thinking of jumping back into the Bioshock games. Or maybe Fire Emblem? Mmm. Fire Emblem.

Are you writing? Anything? How’s it going? Sound off. Check in. How goes the wordsmithing, cohort penmonkeys? Harder now? Easier? Getting any words down or is it just a lot of screaming into various jars and yard holes?

Here is a bee. Also a secret caterpillar. And a not so-secret caterpillar. And birds! You can find more pics and nonsense over at Flickr or Instagram.

From Edgar Award finalist Debra Jo Immergut, YOU AGAIN is a taut, twisting work of literary suspense about a woman haunted by her younger self. Booklist calls it “a furious page turner” and Kirkus, in a starred review, says it’s “a profound meditation on love, fate, ambition, and regret.”

I write best when my novel feels like a Rubik’s Cube

You Again began with an unsettling vision. One day in  New York City,  I pushed my son in his stroller past the old tenement building I’d lived years earlier, when I was a 22-year-old party girl with secret, fierce aspirations to be a novelist. I had the strangest sense that, if the old wooden door swung open, my younger self would come striding out. What would she think if she saw me, married woman, pushing this toddler around, and no novel to show for it? Would she be furious with me?

It felt so real. I never forgot that vision. A few years later, I found my way back to writing in a small way, and I decided to explore the idea of a woman meeting her younger self. How would such a thing happen? And why? What would the results be? How would it change her?

These were really thorny questions. I challenged myself to provide some plausible explanations for this twisting of time–while not over-explaining it and draining off all the mystery. I found this challenge completely absorbing. It nearly broke my brain working it all out but I’m really proud of the result, and now, at last, I know how to get my ass in the chair and stay there for hundreds of hours and hundreds of pages. Embed a puzzle deep in it the story’s heart. I’ll be under its thrall until I figure out how to solve it.

My red is not your red

When I was working on the first complete draft of the novel, I was lucky enough to spend a month at an artist’s colony–which was like a luxe sleepaway camp for obsessive creative oddballs. I met an artist there named Franklin Evans (super talented, look him up) and though he was rather retiring and reticent, I wheedled my way into the studio he’d been given, a spooky old stone building in the woods. I told him I was writing a book about a painter and that it would help me at that moment to smell his paints. Poor guy! He agreed. While I was just soaking up the orderly chaos of his workspace–he was piecing together brightly hued works from art tape and bits of small paintings–I asked him about his favorite art-related books. He named two. One was a biography of Matisse. The other was “Interpretation of Color” by Josef Albers. I bought them both. The Matisse was fascinating–but the Albers was like the keys to the kingdom–I instantly knew that my main character, Abigail, would have used this book as her bible.  In the book, Albers methodically demonstrates many surprising and mysterious properties of color, and how it’s all about context. I learned that, because the inner structures  of eyes are as individual as our fingerprints, no two people seem the same hues. Your red is not my red. This became one of the controlling ideas of the novel—how we are ruled by our very personal perceptions of reality.

Some part of me wants to smash things

I lived in Berlin in the 1990s, just after the fall of the Wall. In certain parts of town, I’d see these black-clad wildlings who were always calling for some “aktion” or other, often protesting the eviction of squatters from the ruined buildings that had been left to crumble since the war. Every May Day, the antifa would battle the police in certain parks and streets, and both sides seem to relish this ritual. I found it fascinating, especially since I come from an American generation that didn’t do much street-marching or protesting. I’d rarely seen such things up close. In recent years, visiting Berlin, I actually sought out a few demos, just to observe them. I wondered: could this European strain of antifascism–which began in earnest in 1920s Italy during the rise of Mussolini–ever make inroads into the US? I suspected the answer would be yes–and then Trump’s inauguration happened, when the American Antifa threw its first few really resonant punches. While working on You Again, I decided that Abigail’s 16-year-old son, Pete, might be attracted to this rising movement intent on destroying the status quo, given how unhappy his parents seemed with their status quo. Without endorsing them, I have to admit that, as a writer, I found their passion, their chaos, and their boldness to be powerful narrative fuel, and introducing this element changed the course of the novel.

Secondary characters are the tastiest treats

Do other writers feel this way? Secondary characters bring me such pleasure. While my central characters are busy questing for answers to the great puzzles of their lives, the secondary characters are just busy being their bad selves. They tend to be big personalities. Quirky, angry, goofy, egotistical. They make me laugh. They mouth off in ways that surprise me. In my first novel, The Captives, I adored writing the scenes that centered on my side dishes–a feckless teenage junkie, a Russian gang moll. In You Again, I came to understand that the secondary characters are where I get to indulge in off-kilter dialogue and weird humor.  I really enjoyed inhabiting my ultraglam art-world queen, my shady Brooklyn import-export dealer, and my magenta-haired Antifa girl. I have to restrain myself from overpopulating my books with minor characters, I love them so fiercely.

Truly serious sweat must be broken

This is a lesson I have been learning every day since I made a determined return to fiction writing after being laid-off from a fulltime job five years ago. Yes, inventing imaginary worlds and concocting imaginary humans–especially those tasty secondary characters–is deeply satisfying fun. You can’t force the flow, uou don’t want to inhibit the stream of emotion and imagination. You must allow it to bubble forth with ease and gentleness and some degree of joy.

That’s all true for first draft writing, when you’re just seeking to tap the wellspring, that mysterious deep source of the best raw ideas.

But then, it’s time to bring the hammer down. I took me many years to understand how much harder I would need to work on later drafts. How ruthless I needed to be, as I examined every character, every word, every plot turn, the beginnings and endings. If I didn’t feel painfully stretched to the limits of my abilities, the end result wasn’t even going to be close to good enough. We’re asking so much of our readers–listen to me blather on for page after page after page!–so if I’m not committed to the project with ferocious and unceasing effort, then I don’t deserve to be read. That’s been a tough lesson to learn, and it’s taken many years to really sink in, but I now feel its truth deep in my bones. All too often I fall short, but at least I understand how high I have to reach.

***

Debra Jo Immergut is the author of You Again, forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins in July 2020, and The Captives, a 2019 Edgar Award finalist for Best Debut Novel by an American Author, published in the US by Ecco and in over a dozen other countries. She has also published a collection of short fiction, Private Property (Random House). Her essays and stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Narrative, and The New York Times, among others. A recipient of Michener and MacDowell fellowships, she has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in western Massachusetts.

Debra Jo Immergut: Website | Instagram | Twitter

You Again: Bookshop.org | Amazon

Buc and Eld are the first private detectives in a world where pirates roam the seas, mages speak to each other across oceans, mechanical devices change the tide of battle, and earthly wealth is concentrated in the hands of a powerful few.

It’s been weeks since ships last returned to the magnificent city of Servenza with bounty from the Shattered Coast. Disaster threatens not just the city’s trading companies but the empire itself. When Buc and Eld are hired to investigate, Buc swiftly discovers that the trade routes have become the domain of a sharp-eyed pirate queen who sinks all who defy her.

Now all Buc and Eld have to do is sink the Widowmaker’s ship….

Unfortunately for Buc, the gods have other plans.

Unfortunately for the gods, so does Buc.

***

Writing a protagonist who is smarter than you isn’t easy (duh)

Sambuciña or ‘Buc’ is the main character of The Sin in the Steel. She’s a Sherlockian teenager raised on the streets who is an autodidact that took to books like a duck to water. She is also well above genius levels and while I’m no slouch, Einstein I am not. Streetwise and booksmart Buc sees every possible angle and because we see the world through her eyes it meant that I NEEDED to see every possible angle too. That proved harder than I anticipated, especially when she’s thinking through the potential ways to resolve a situation and then we see her execute her thoughts (in both brainy and stabby ways). What was fun about having such a brilliant protag though, was figuring out ways she would fail. Buc’s tongue is often as sharp as the half dozen blades she’s got hidden on her person and one thing that became clear is there is a difference between intelligence and wisdom. A reviewer compared her to Alexander Hamilton and in many ways, that’s an apt comparison. Hamilton never knew when to stop in debates and duels, ultimately to his (final) detriment. Even if it was hard, it was always a lot of fun to see her both get herself out of impossible situations and land in something even worse. Hopefully you’ll think so too!

I have a brand

Before you land an agent or get a book deal, you’re primarily writing for yourself. Singular. An audience of one. Even after you get an agent or a book deal, you’ll still be writing for yourself, but what changes is that you will begin to receive input and feedback that informs how you think about who else might be reading your book(s). I’d been writing for six or seven years when I signed with DongWon Song (who was an impressive editor at Orbit before he became an agent) and if you ever get the chance to hear him talk I can almost guarantee he’ll talk about author brand at some point. A brand is something that should develop naturally, but then once you realize what it is, you can really lean into it. It’s how you know you’re reading a Stephen King or Victoria Schwab book after the first few pages. I wrote a million words before DongWon helped me recognize what my brand was: adventure fantasy with heart. Looking back on the trunk novels (7) I’d written before The Sin in the Steel I realized they had some common elements. Namely fast pacing, tight transitions, and loads of fireworks…but despite all those plot-heavy elements I just mentioned, they were driven by the characters. All of my book ideas have come from a character appearing in my mind…often with a word or a sentence or an emotion appearing with them. Realizing that really helped me focus scenes, character arcs, all of it. It’s kind of like wandering the wilderness, lost, and then discovering you had a compass in your pocket the entire time. Brands…who knew?

I am an underwriter

Kill your darlings. It’s one of the first pieces of advice given to new writers. Right after write what you know. Both are great, but both are, to one degree or another, bullshit. The idea behind kill your darlings is that as a writer you put too much fluff in and by making the prose, the plot, and the scenes tighter you’ll polish that diamond in the rough into a display item. It’s great in theory, but like all things writing, it’s something that may or may not work for you and if it doesn’t work, toss it.

I’d listened to a bunch of authors rhapsodize about the need to cut ten percent–or more!–of your novel and so novel after novel, I tried to do just that. And I hated it. Friends, I hated it so badly because it never felt like I was making anything better, instead it felt like I was just ruining the book.

Turns out, it’s because I kinda was? I only realized after Melissa Singer, my Tor Editor kept asking for more in edits. Being an underwriter means I sometimes end up leaving some knowledge or beats or character growth in my head instead of pushing it out through my fingers that are dancing across the keys. That translates into the reader having questions about how or why certain things happened or leaving some threads of gold in the scene so it reads like a seven or eight out of ten instead of an eleven. For example, the draft that got me my agent? That was 99,000 words. The draft we submitted to editors was around 112,000 and the draft you’re reading clocks in at 123,000. Instead of cutting ten percent I ended up adding nearly twenty five percent to the final version! That doesn’t mean I don’t cut lines or scenes, but it does mean for every scene I cut, I need to add more. I just finished the final edits on book two and it was a similar story.

I have to say, this was probably the best thing I learned while writing The Sin in the Steel. Why? Because I love writing and I do it pretty quickly too. I can crank out 10-15,000 words a week and if that’s what killing your darlings means, hand me the axe.

Writing is solitary, but publishing really is a collaboration

I talked a bit before about how lonely writing is. It’s just you and the blank page (often with a maddening cursor blinking at you, questioning why you aren’t making it go away with words). Stephen King famously said writing a novel is like crossing the Atlantic in a bathtub solo. Writing is all of that, but publishing is something else entirely. I thought I’d done my research before I signed with an agent and we got a 3-book deal with Tor but I was mistaken. Sorely so.

Working with an agent and an editor opened up so many new ideas for me, helped me hone my craft, and really polish my work. But that’s still about the writing. What I wasn’t prepared for was discovering the entire iceberg of folks working below the water that make books possible. There were cover designers and artists looking to not only bring the book to life on the dust jacket, but also to make sure the thousand words the picture told would grab would-be readers and make them pick it up off the shelf and crack open that first page. Marketing folks who reached out to bloggers and bookstagrammers and made sure advanced copies found their way to readers who would become champions and build buzz. They crafted campaigns and worked with managers of bookstores, ensuring the sellers would be fired up to recommend the book to their customers. Social Media gurus who get the word out through Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter and more. Publicists who have to deal with nervous first time authors asking a million questions and wanting to do a million things (while having no real idea what exactly is effective). On the practical level there’s folks focused on page lay out and proofs and the physical act of printing the book. Audio teams finding narrators and laying down recordings and giving audible voice to your world.

The list goes on and on, but the best part? Discovering this new found family of book lovers. Look, no one goes into publishing to get rich. If you’re reading this, you’re one of the tribe, but you know how few we are. How many of your co-workers, friends, or family read more than 5 books a year? The margins are thin, my friends. People get into publishing because they are passionate about books. Books entertain, they inform, they can literally save lives. They allow the voices of those dead centuries, millennia even, to speak to us. Books are magic and so are the folks across publishing working to produce them.

It’s the little things

I thought that walking into a bookstore and seeing my book on the shelf would be the moment that would bring me to my knees, but I don’t believe that anymore (Thank God, right? Because I don’t think I’ll be going into a bookstore until 2022 at this rate). Why? Well as trite as it sounds, it turns out…this debut book was really about the journey.

I wrote the first version of what would become The Sin in the Steel in July 2015. In July 2016 my wife and I came home from a night out at the theatre and a drink at a local bar after. I remember it so vividly because it’d been a great night and a stranger at the bar had asked me about the inkwell and quill and quote tattoo I had on my arm. I told them I’d gotten it because I was a writer and while I’d initially intended to wait until I had a deal, I had realized I wasn’t going to stop writing so I went ahead and got it anyway. That was still on my mind when I came home and saw an email from the person who would eventually become my agent asking if I had time to talk on the phone. Dear Reader, I sank to the floor and my wife thought I was having a heart attack. After eight books, I’d begun to lose the faith.

The day my future editor called me is another landmark moment that I’ll never forget. At the start of the conversation I was very much aware that I was trying to sell her on me and the book and somewhere around the middle I realized it had shifted and she was trying to sell herself and Tor Books to me. It wasn’t a tough sell. I remember hanging up and calling DongWon and saying, “I think they’re going to make an offer.” They did. It was July 2018.

Fast forward to July 2020 and incredibly, surprisingly, finally, The Sin in the Steel is out in the wild. I remember seeing the copy edits in the font that would go into the book. The first Advanced Reader Copies. The first blurb, first review. First time I got a payment for meeting a milestone. All of those were powerful moments. I’ve spent years with Buc and Eld and their story and as I’m writing their concluding adventure now, I realize I’ve had my time with them.

So yes, I’m super excited the book is going to hit shelves, but that moment when you walk into a bookstore and a book catches your eye, so you open it up and see, “Before I learned how to read, I thought knowledge was finite, dead and decaying inside old men’s skulls”, that moment, Dear Reader, is for all of you.

***

RYAN VAN LOAN served six years in the US Army Infantry, on the front lines of Afghanistan. He now works in healthcare innovation. The Sin in the Steel is his debut novel. Van Loan and his wife live in Pennsylvania.

Ryan Van Loan: Website | Twitter

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Fifteen-year-old Jennifer Strange is the Sparrow, cursed with the ability to give ghosts and demonic spirits a body-a flesh and blood anchor in the mortal world-with the touch of her hand. When a ghost attacks her high school and awakens her powers, her father dumps her unceremoniously in the care of her estranged older sister Liz, leaving only his journal as an explanation.

Drawn to the power of the Sparrow, the supernatural creatures preying on Savannah, Georgia will do anything to receive Jennifer’s powerful gift. The sisters must learn to trust each other again and uncover the truth about their family history by deciphering their father’s journal…because if they can’t, Jennifer’s uncontrolled power will rip apart the veil that separates the living from the dead.

A fast-paced and splattery romp, fans of Supernatural, Buffy, and Evil Dead will enjoy JENNIFER STRANGE – the first illustrated novel in a trilogy of stylish queer young adult horror books with big scares for readers not quite ready for adult horror.

Cat Scully’s illustrations bring the ghosts and demons of her fictional world to eerie and beautiful life, harkening back to the style of SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK and Ransom Riggs’ MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN.

***

It’s okay to be gross

The nature of Jennifer’s power called for it. I mean, if you have the ability to give ghosts and demons a body, and that demon has to rip right out of the possessed host to be born into a physical form, things get…messy. As a female writing a young adult horror book, I got pushed in a lot of directions, most of them re-concepting Jennifer’s gift into the gothic and romantic arenas. I saw nothing wrong with being gothic or romantic. Both genres I tend to read voraciously, especially in dark fiction. But I had to face that wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. I wanted to write about Buffy before she became the Buffy of season one, the prequel early years as she transitioned from clueless teenage cheerleader into the Slayer. I watched Ash Williams fight Deadites, wise cracking the whole way, and found myself secretly fantasizing how cool it would be to see a girl in his shoes. I wanted girls to be allowed to make jokes and deal with gross horror situations. I’ve loved horror almost all of my life, but there was nothing between Strong Female Protagonist ™ or the Final Girls of horror films to reference. I found myself holding a seed of an idea that wouldn’t leave me alone. I wanted to write something gross, something funny, a story where readers follow two sisters as they wrestle with a dark power in a family drama saga not unlike the Supernatural brothers Sam and Dean. Going down this route would mean ignoring a lot of advice, to gather the courage to write gore despite what everyone told me. Thanks to my agent and a slew of friends in the horror community, I discovered it was not only okay to be a female writer and write gross, but I wasn’t alone.

Get over your fear of meeting people, but don’t assume you own their time

It took me a lot of years to get this book published, about eleven all told. During those years, I gathered my courage and decided to meet as many writers as possible and give back as much as possible to learn the publishing business. I joined Pitch Wars as a mentor for five years, helped authors using my graphic design skills to create pre-order campaigns, I illustrated world maps for books, I was the Young Adult Editor for the Horror Writers Association, and ran conferences as a track director. Again and again, despite how afraid I was to go up and talk to writers who were further along in their careers, I did it. I tried to be bold, but never assume anything of their time. I genuinely wanted to get to know them and never assumed any of them would read my work, critique my book, or break me in. I had spent years in the south alone, not knowing any other writers who were into weird and dark speculative fiction like me. It wasn’t until I started being brave and genuine that I started to find my core tribe. I’m sure glad I did, because years later when it was my turn for my book to come out, my publishing house went through a seriously hard spring. I was left to handle most of the book publication process alone. I had to gather my tribe and ask for help to get the word out about my book, create swag, edit the book, get it on Netgalley, find trade reviews, and plan events during the coronavirus pandemic. I’ve had a campaign that went about the same as it would have (minus the in-person events) because of the people I’m lucky enough to call my friends. I really doubt anyone would know about my indie young adult horror series without them.

There is such a thing as taking too much advice

I’ve always been eager to follow new writer advice. When I was a baby writer querying Jennifer Strange back in 2012, I eagerly lapped up every article I could find. Every critique partner session, I took almost every piece of advice. They were just trying to help me, right? I needed to put the best novel out there that I could. From what every article told me, I was too close to my work to see what was wrong. After years of this, I ended up with a Frankenstein’s monster of a novel. I didn’t know what the story was or where it was going anymore. I had completely fallen out of love with the idea and had tossed it in a trunk. After chucking Jennifer Strange, I rage-wrote an entire novel about a seafood chef fighting fish monsters. I did whatever the heck I wanted with no input from anyone for the first time in years and finally started to hear my own voice again. That novel landed my current agent. Trust your gut. Not to the point you don’t take any advice or critique at all! I’m not saying swing completely in that direction, but not everyone is going to get your book or your work. After retrieving Jennifer Strange out of a dirty garbage shoot, dusting it off, and getting it published, I had to learn to find what I loved about my work and my voice again. It wasn’t for everyone, and that was okay. I’d rather my book not be for everyone than try to please everyone by writing a patchwork quilt of broken story ever again.

Researching “real-life” ghost encounters are way scarier than movie ones

For Jennifer Strange, I went down a rabbit hole of watching every ghost movie I could find. Being born in the late eighties, I didn’t grow up with the Warrens or the media frenzy surrounding them, but I found the entire narrative fascinating. Were they telling the truth and trying to protect people, or were they just after the money and publicity? I went down another research hole, but the stories of their encounters terrified me. So much of the details seemed like they could swing in either direction, but the idea of capitalizing on fear of the unknown interested me. This idea became a large part of the puzzle piece that fell into place while writing the overall series arc. I wanted to show rival ghost hunting families on either side of that argument–people in it for profit and people in it to protect the living. Researching the book became more terrifying when I turned around on a walking tour in Roswell, Georgia and found myself face-to-face with a ghost when I wasn’t looking for one. I think to this day that’s why I’m never afraid of book monsters and always of movie ones—I’ve seen something I can’t explain. I guess it really is like they say…real life is sometimes stranger than fiction.

It’s okay to find a writing method and then totally change it

I didn’t know I had heart failure until I was in the hospital facing an impossible diagnosis. It was genetic mutation, a rare misfire of the heart that causes it to balloon and then fail under stress. Before my heart failed down to ten percent in 2018, I had a method as a writer that worked for me. Without fail, I’d put on my playlist and write no matter the noise or interruption at two thousand words an hour speed. I would plot everything out in advance, and I was lightning across the keyboard, sure and steady. After 2018, everything changed. With my heart failure came the loss of being able to read, and subsequently, to write. I left the hospital to find my first book Jennifer Strange had finally sold. First came the joy and then came the panic. I couldn’t read a sticky note to myself much less my own manuscript. Coming from clocking the pace I used to pull, going back to the drawing board in my methods was the most painful thing I’ve ever gone through. I had to teach myself how to write and read when the words swam and every noise would send my brain reeling into fog. I pushed the book’s publication date back from 2019 to 2020 and was patient with myself. I found audio books and subsequently Microsoft Word’s “Read Aloud” feature helped me read again. Slowly but surely being only able to read auditorily turned to being able to read sentences, and then paragraphs, and then pages. Writing became a muscle I had to train all over again from square one, with new methods and workarounds and tricks to get me writing, like exercise to get the blood flowing to my brain. And you know what? All of it was okay. All of it was worth it. I learned to start over and rethink my method when my health called for it. Writing as a practice has always been built by inches, not by miles. In some ways, I’m glad my health took a wrecking ball to my previous writing habits. I’m more thoughtful now, more careful in my word choice, because I have to slowly digest every word then read it aloud to hear if it translated to the page. And for that lesson, I’m grateful.

…

Cat Scully is the author and illustrator of the young adult illustrated horror series JENNIFER STRANGE, out July 21, 2020 from Haverhill House Publishing. Cat is best known for her world maps featured in Brooklyn Brujas trilogy by Zoraida Cordova, Winterspell by Claire Legrand, and Give the Dark My Love by Beth Revis. She works in video game development for the Deep End Games, working hard on their next title. She lives off Earl Grey tea, plays a lot of Bioshock, is a huge Evil Dead fan, and plays the drums with her musician husband. She lives outside of Boston and is represented by Miriam Kriss of the Irene Goodman Literary Agency.​ Follow her on Instagram or Twitter at @CatMScully or visit her at 

Cat Scully: Website | Twitter

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It’s just one of those true things that for many, the DNA of Star Wars is in what we do — either because we’re fans or because it’s so pervasive, for good or ill. Here’s one author talking about that very thing — Django Wexler!

***

I wanted to tell the story of the inspiration for Ashes of the Sun, and that means talking about Star Wars.  So let me get this out the way up front: I love Star Wars.  It’s quite possible that no other single franchise has taken up so much of my fan energy over the decades.  I have a story in a new Star Wars anthology, and you have no idea how much fanboy-squee that makes me feel.

I say all this because this story involves a certain amount of nitpicking, and I want to make it clear that for a person like me (that is, a world-building obsessed turbo-nerd) this kind of fascinated close analysis is the highest form of affection, rather than trying to put down something I don’t like.  I can love The Empire Strikes Back with a fervent passion and also ask importunate questions like “How did they get from Hoth to Bespin if the hyperdrive was broken?”

Anyway, with that caveat understood, the story of Ashes begins with the Jedi, and specifically the way Jedi recruitment is pictured in the SW prequels and The Clone Wars TV show.  In the prequels, we see very young children (maybe five or six?) being trained by Yoda.  In The Clone Wars, we see younglings brought in for training who are maybe slightly older (starting in S5E6 “The Gathering”) and put through a bunch of harrowing tests in order to get their lightsaber crystals.  Watching this, I couldn’t help but start thinking — this is creepy as hell, right?

The thing is, the Jedi aren’t just a training society for force-sensitives, where you might send your kid to pick a few tricks like going to karate class at the mall.  They are a religious order of ascetic warrior monks, who swear an oath to uphold an extremely strict code of behavior.  This is, to put it mildly, not a thing which it is in a five-year-old’s power to understand or agree to.  (I find myself agreeing with the Harry Plinkett review when he says the whole “not permitted to love” thing means they must lose a lot of Jedi teenagers.)

It’s also not completely clear what happens if the parents aren’t on board with this.  We see some parents who are sad about it, but they’re all ultimately convinced.  If they weren’t, though, it’s not hard to image the kids would be brought along for their own good — the Jedi Order has some unspecified-but-vast legal authority in the Galactic Republic, and a strong interest in making sure Force-sensitives grow up to be Jedi.  Clone Wars’ narrator tells us that the younglings soon understand that the Order is their true family, which sounds extremely like a thing a cult leader would say.

(A related weirdness of Clone Wars is that the enormous authority of the Jedi within the Republic results in situations where fourteen-year-old girls are given command authority over literally thousands of soldiers, in addition to the law enforcement and other powers they already have.  Try to imagine a situation where your local teen, who was already an FBI Special Agent, was also commissioned a brigadier general on the spot.)

Okay, so, weird, right?  But in-universe, we have the Force, which makes it all work.  Younglings want to become Jedi, and their parents are okay with it, because presumably the Force wouldn’t allow things to be otherwise.  (And maybe making kids military commanders makes more sense when those kids have provably-correct magical insights, in addition to being combat gods.)  Again, this is not a critique of Star Wars, it’s just the kind of thing that gets me thinking as a world-builder and a writer.  And it got me asking the question — what if you didn’t have the Force to make things better?

More precisely, what if you had the magic-powers part of the Force, but not the semi-divine guidance part?  After all, in Star Wars, the Jedi are in charge because they’re wise and good, but also, it’s pretty clear, because nobody can stop them.  (The SW MMO The Old Republic storylines depicted this wonderfully on the Empire side — it was clear that nobody thought having a bunch of Sith religious lunatics running the government was a good idea, but since they were also a bunch of unstoppable killing machine … shrug emoji?)  And this, finally, brings us around to Ashes of the Sun.

(As an aside, it’s not the first time I’ve been inspired by this kind of theme.  My middle-grade series, The Forbidden Library, came from the observation that Dumbledore sure does spend a lot of time allowing Harry and his friends to get into life-threatening danger in order to accomplish things that he, Dumbledore, could do easily and safely.  In the books, we trust Dumbledore because he’s both well-meaning and knows what’s best, but removing this element — what TVTropes calls the Omniscient Morality License — gives us what I described as the Sketchy Dumbledore Scenario, where an old guy tells you “Hey, you’re a wizard and the Chosen One!  Now fight these guys I don’t like for me.”)

In the world of Ashes, you can be born with the ability to access deiat, the power of creation.  Using special tools, deiat users called centarchs become almost unstoppable fighters.  The community of centarchs, the Twilight Order, see themselves as the last bastion of civilization, and this is not unreasonable: after a race of deiat-wielders called the Chosen went extinct and their great civilization collapsed, only the Order has access to the power to hold human society together and protect with from the monstrous plaguespawn on its borders.  Centarchs have unlimited authority, both legal and practical, because apart from another centarch, no one can stop them.  But they don’t have an all-powerful Force assuring them everything will come out for the best; deiat doesn’t provide guidance, it just blows things up.

Gyre is eight years old, and his sister Maya five, when a centarch comes to their home and declares that Maya has the gift and will be taken to join the Order.  Maya doesn’t want to go (what five-year-old would, right?) and Gyre tries to help her, and gets badly injured for his troubles.  The incident sets them on opposite paths: twelve years late, Maya is a loyal member of the Order and devoted to her mentor and friends, while Gyre has become a thief and a rebel, scouring the dark places of the world for forbidden power that will let him stand up to the centarchs.

There’s a lot more to Ashes then that, of course.  Like any good story, once I started working on it it took on a life of its own, and there’s a few other big threads and themes that got drawn in.  But the original idea, and the core argument between these two characters, comes back to my Star Wars thought experiment — if you have people who are born with the potential for great power, can you justify forcing them to use it for the common good?  And, if you do, is it fair to assign authority based on what is after all just the luck of the genetic draw?  The Order, in Ashes, would answer yes to both questions, and they could easily be right; survival is a struggle in a world full of monsters.  But ruling classes — centarch or Jedi — like to construct elegant justifications for their dominance, when in the end it just comes down to who has the magic swords.

***

Long ago, a magical war destroyed an empire, and a new one was built in its ashes. But still the old grudges simmer, and two siblings will fight on opposite sides to save their world in the start of Django Wexler’s new epic fantasy trilogy.

Gyre hasn’t seen his beloved sister since their parents sold her to the mysterious Twilight Order. Now, twelve years after her disappearance, Gyre’s sole focus is revenge, and he’s willing to risk anything and anyone to claim enough power to destroy the Order.

Chasing rumors of a fabled city protecting a powerful artifact, Gyre comes face-to-face with his lost sister. But she isn’t who she once was. Trained to be a warrior Maya wields magic for the Twilight Order’s cause. Standing on opposite sides of a looming civil war, the two siblings will learn that not even the ties of blood will keep them from splitting the world in two.

About the author: Django Wexler is the bestselling fantasy author of the Shadow Campaigns series and the Wells of Sorcery young adult series. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh with degrees in creative writing and computer science, and worked for the university in artificial intelligence research. Eventually he migrated to Microsoft in Seattle, where he now lives with two cats and a teetering mountain of books. When not writing, he wrangles computers, paints tiny soldiers, and plays games of all sorts. 

Django Wexler: Website

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