Instead of one delicious cookie, here you get a stepped-on cookie, fractured into many crumbly bits! What a special gift! Anyway. Here, again, are my SLAPDASH DISORGANIZED THOUGHTS during what I think is Week 349 of the Quarantimes. You’re doing great, sweetie.

I’ve started to finally work again with some effect. I’m not like, hard-charging at 100% or anything, but I have a measure of focus I didn’t have weeks ago. And when I say “measure,” it’s exactly that — it doesn’t last as long as it used to (before ALL THIS BULLSHIT began), but it also lasts a whole lot longer than it did, say, the week prior. Helps too that I have the story I’m working on more or less figured out. But “figuring it out” took me longer, too, than it normally would. Again, I just try to remember, we’re all walking on broken legs. Doesn’t mean we can’t get from Point A to Point B, but we’re gonna do a lot of hobbling about and crutch-walking, and that means it’s gonna be slower. Still gotta move. But gotta take it easier, too because you shouldn’t try to run on a broken leg.

Paul Vasquez, the Double Rainboy guy, died from COVID. And that’s a helluva thing to write. He had what I consider an outsized impact on how we view beauty and nature and honestly I think he gave people permission to feel that way about what they see out in the world and to express that feeling in a big way. To see the disease take him away from this beautiful world is a decidedly not-beautiful thing. But he left beauty — and recognition of beauty — for us.

My baking situation has become a real problem. I’ve baked so much fucking bread I’m pretty sure I’m just a big sack of carbs. I baked so much bread I had too much and it went stale and then I took that bread and turned it into bread pudding, which I’ve also never made before, and it was delicious, and now my heart is just a crusty loaf of bread. I am bread. Hard on the outside, soft on the inside, sour throughout. I still haven’t cracked the “sandwich bread” thing, though — each time it’s come out like a brick. It’s still good, just not… sandwich bread. I’ve also been sourcing flour from small mills around the country, like a fucking weirdo. What is the deal with bread? Is it an emblem of being able to do a kind of Frontier Survival Act? Is it the fear of not being able to get bread? Or is it merely the comfort of smelling fresh baking bread? Have we all been colonized by sourdough starters? Maybe we have.

My sourdough starter is named Steve, by the way. He’s still bubbling and making hooch. The key, and thanks to Seamus Blackley for letting me in on this, the “your starter should double in size” is basically some Instagram bullshit. Mine never doubled in size. Never even grew that much. But it’s vigorous and makes great bread. Good job, Steve. Good goddamn job.

Our dog has cancer. Or had. She grew what would best be called a “sinister barnacle” upon her neck, under her collar — vet at first thought, well, maybe it’s an infected ingrown hair or something, but it got kinda thumb-sized and angry, but then stablized. So they had us watch and wait. It was good for a couple months but then grew, as sinister barnacles tend to. So, we scheduled the surgery and it was last Monday. It went well, though now her neck looks like some real Frankenstein shit. And hard to protect that area because it’s where a collar would go — so we have a towel swaddled around her like it’s a scarf, and she traipses around the yard as if it’s the French Riviera. Got a report back, and it was cancer — soft cell sarcoma or something? Slow-growing, and they got it out with clean margins. So, in theory, as long as she heals well, she should be good, and he said she should live out her normal lifespan. So, bad news turned to good news? Or something?

The vet was all no-contact. An impressive operation. Here in PA, it seems people are taking this more seriously than in other places… buuuuut also not as seriously as they should. I had a building inspector just roll up on me in my shed while I was working. No mask. Tried to just walk the fuck in through the door. We had a propane guy try to pet our dogs while they were in the yard — which is fraught even in non-pandemic times because, uhh, they’re dogs, and dogs can bite off your fingerbits, buddy. Had to get a battery replaced on our old Forester (we’d been running it, but it still died on us) and AAA was like, “It’s non-contact, don’t worry,” but then the guy showed up and it was of course not that at all — he refused to do it all himself, needed someone in the car while he replaced the battery. He was masked and everything was socially distant, so it was fine, but eennnhh. So stressful.

Hell is other people, now. Officially. Sartre knew what was up.

Local politicians of the G-O-P variety are showing their colors. They want our country to reopen all the way and they want the “numbers” for the disease to stop including nursing home and other care facilities, as if those are hermetically-sealed chambers where the disease gets in but never gets out. And it further suggests that the elderly who die from this… aren’t really people, anyway, which is fucking gross. The altar of Mammon is wide and hungry for blood, and they’re happy to throw us on it in order for it to disgorge a few golden coins into their pockets.

You see photos and you increasingly realize there are Two Americas. And we are drifting further and farther apart. It’s not exactly that it’s new — there was the Anti-Mask Brigade or whatever in 1918, and we had full-on Nazi rallies in Madison Square Garden in the 30s. But social media and the internet have afforded people the luxury of choosing their own consensus reality (if you ever played Mage: The Ascension, boy will that fuck with your head). They get to pick a world where on some spectrum the virus isn’t that bad, or it doesn’t exist, or it was pumped into our blood due to evil flu shots and now we’re being thought-controlled via 5G by twin gay Satanic puppetmasters, Bill Gates and Tom Hanks, who want to make a new vaccine that will presumably be filled with… I dunno, robots or something. We’ve corroded access to education and eroded people’s critical thinking skills so now they’re happy to swill whatever Flavor-Aid will get them to the Promised Lands. The cult-like thinking is spreading like aerosolized syphilis. We’ve got these concentric circles starting to drift together — Q weenies, and anti-vaxxers on both the left and the right, and Trumpies, and militia-nuts and… is there any way to get the Flat Earthers in there? Probably.

Murder hornets are just a thing they’re using to get clicks and try to scare you, by the way, evidenced by the fact that no entomologist is gonna call them “murder hornets.” That’s not science. And they’re not even widespread. This is like the killer bee phenomenon from when I was a kid. THE KILLER BEES ARE COMING FROM AFRICA AND well, you remember the rest. Also a lot of wasps and such are useful to the world in a variety of ways, often eating or parasitizing worse critters. Unless they’re up in your grill, don’t try to wipe them out, please, because they’re almost certainly not the Asian Hornets you’re afraid of. If they are, call a professional to assess. But also, HOT BEE BALLS.

Hey, look. I got a box of books! Wanderers paperback, out 5/19. Please to buy from your local favorite indie bookstore? If you don’t have one, Doylestown Books will deliver.

Mother’s Day was tougher this year than I expected. And a hard balance because, my son is celebrating his mother (and I am too), and I can’t be all morose, but this is the first Mother’s Day without mine aaaaand. Well. It’s hard.

Oof, this shit is getting depressing. I don’t mean for it to be. Uhh. I’m seeing a lot of new birds recently! Blue-headed vireo. Magnolia warbler. Orchard oriole. (Those sound like launch codes.) Also there are brown thrashers nesting in the hedge by my shed and they are fucking brutal against blue jays. I just saw a BIRB WAR between a thrasher, a jay, and a catbird. Noisily mosh-pitting in the sky. Here’s the thrasher, and then I’m out, byeeeee:

Laura Lam is a damn fine writer whose work has only grown better over time — and her newest, Goldilocks, is evidence of that. It’s sharply relevant and has that feeling of a screw turning and digging in as you read it, and I cannot recommend it enough — and here she talks about some of the same stuff I’ve grappled with, re: Wanderers, meaning, oops, I predicted the future. Sci-fi writers aren’t out here trying to predict the future, really; we’re usually trying to talk about the present and the past. But sometimes, we hit the mark just the same. Here’s Laura!

* * *

I thought Terrible Minds would be the place to talk about the strange, horrible feeling of accidentally predicting the future, since Chuck did it too with Wanderers.

It happens to pretty much any science fiction writer who writes in the near future. Worldbuilding is basically extrapolating cause and effect in different ways. You see a news article somewhere like Futurism and you give a little chuckle—it’s something happening that you predicted in a book, and it’s a strange sense of déjà vu. I used to even share some of the articles with the hashtag #FalseHeartsIRL when I released some cyberpunks a few years ago. I can’t do that with Goldilocks, really, because the stuff I predicted isn’t some interesting bit of tech or a cool way to combat climate change through architecture or urban planning.

Because this time it’s people wearing masks outside. It’s abortion bans. It’s months of isolation. It’s a pandemic.

In real life, it’ll rarely play out exactly as you plan in a book. Some things twist or distort or are more unrealistic than you’d be allowed to put into fiction (e.g. murder wasps or anything that the orange man in the white house utters). In Goldilocks, I have people wearing masks due to climate change being a health risk, which was inspired by how disconcerted I felt seeing a photo of my mother wearing a mask due to the wildfires in California while I live in Scotland.

The rising tide of misogyny and other forms of bigotry has been on my mind the last few years, so I created a dystopian future, my take on a Handmaid’s Tale scenario—how would that shake down if climate change meant thirty years of habitability at most? I took a slow, insidious approach, though I deliberately didn’t go into a detailed step-by-step breakdown from how exactly we go from here to there. This was because it would date itself immediately (it already has, I suppose, as there’s no mention of coronavirus in the book), and I also thought it’d be more interesting for readers to fill in those blanks and each find a subtly different route.

I figured you’d still try to use reproductive health as a way to control power over the narrative, and the Heartbeat Bills that cropped up while I was drafting last year and the way states are using COVID-19 as a way to ban abortions is fairly telling. I also thought about how people offer something that seems good for those who just gave birth but has a sting in the tail—a birth bonus to make the first few years of raising a child easier, but it’s also a way to sneakily encourage people with uteruses to stay home and look after the kid for a few years. If you want any additional kids? You have to pay a very hefty child-tax to get that state-mandated IUD removed, so only the rich are able to have more than one.

Five women steal a spaceship to journey to Cavendish, a planet 10 light years away and humanity’s hope for survival and for a better future. A planet they hopefully won’t spoil like the old one. It’ll take the Atalanta 5 a few months to journey to Mars to use the test warp ring to jump to Epsilon Eridani (the real star for my fake planet), and then a few more months’ travel on the other side. It’s a long time to be with the same people. I did not expect those elements of how the women cope with isolation to be a how-to for 2020. I read a lot of astronaut memoirs, and that has probably helped me cope with lockdown a bit better than I might have (my top rec is Chris Hadfield’s An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth).

Though it’s a mild spoiler, in light of current events I have been warning people that there is a pandemic in the book. It’s not a huge focus of the plot and it never gets graphic, but I forwarded an article about coronavirus to my editor on January 22^nd with basically a slightly more professional version of ‘shit.’ The illness within the book is not quite as clear of an echo as White Mask, it’s still strange. The last thing I expected when I wrote a book with a pandemic was to have its launch interrupted by an actual pandemic.

You don’t feel clever, or proud, when you predict these sorts of things. You feel guilty when you see the nightmares about the future come true instead of the dreams. You wanted it to remain something cautionary. I’m nervous about how to talk about the book—I don’t want to be seen as profiteering off of something so terrible, yet I know some people have also found reading about fictitious versions of current events calming. Because books have a narrative shape, an ending that’s often hopeful. This is comforting when we don’t know when or how this liminal in between phase will end or what our new normal will be.

I worked hard on the book, and it’s had the most pre-pub buzz I’ve had so far (this is my 6^th book). I wanted—I want—it to do well. It’s a particularly painful wistfulness to wonder how it would have done if the supply chain was normal. Instead I see the hardback out of stock at certain retailers and I wonder when it’ll be re-stocked and if potential readers will go to alternate retailers like Bookshop or just shrug and move onto one of the other many books out there in the world instead. When my phone pings a reminder for a planned in person event that isn’t happening now, I daydream about that parallel present where none of this happened. My mom is still halfway around the world instead of visiting me like she was meant to be just now, again wearing a mask outside the house, but for a different reason. She and my parents-in-law are in their 60s and 70s, and my mother-in-law is being treated for cancer. I worry about them every day, about everyone who is at risk.

It’s a gut punch. I didn’t want this future. None of us did.

I hope we move towards a better future.

* * *

Laura Lam: Website | Twitter

Goldilocks: Doylestown Books | Indiebound | Amazon | Powells | B&N

Once again, here we go with less a full-course blog meal, and more a series of vaguely unsatisfying bloglet nibblins, like some grotesque shareable you’d order at Applebee’s that would give you vicious 3AM diarrhea. Also, my favorite Lord of the Rings character was Bloglet Nibblins, half-hobbit, half-orc, all sex machine.

I figured out some business with my middle grade book. In case you didn’t see, ahem ahem, Little Brown bought my MG novel, Dust & Grim, and I’m in the midst of edits on that book, and I rewrote the first act and wasn’t feeling it — but I figured out how to move forward on it in a way that’s satisfying. It’s weird because my BRAINTHINK comes slower at this moment in time — it’s like, the thought I need to find is in the back of the cabinet, but instead of just reaching in and plucking it off the shelf, I have to first push through a wall of pudding. The wall of pudding is gloppy and forbidding in that I cannot see what’s beyond it, so I gotta do a lotta fumbling around.

This mind pudding effect is not kept to just fiction. I get it all the time now. I sat down after lunch today, plonking myself in front of the computer, and I had a list of things I needed to do, and then the moment I sat, that list was gone. Simply inaccessible. I just sat there, slack-jawed, like, I have shit to do, I’m sure of it, buuuuuuuut. (I talk more about this phenomenon with Jared Rizzi on his new podcast, if you care to listen.) So instead I went outside and stood underneath a snow of crabapple blossoms. Oddly, it helped, and I figured out several things I needed to do.

One of the things is about rewilding our property. Found a good native plants place not far away that will deliver, and I’m picking some nice natives to start to go in around the front and back yards, either to replace junk that’s there now or to simply slot in alongside stuff to start competing. The goal is to get more birds and butterflies and buggables and such. Maybe summon a hobo or two, enticed by fragrant flowers, and then we can butcher the ol’ hobos and — I’ve said too much. I don’t want to share my hobo recipes, because then you’ll all start hoarding hobos, and I won’t be able to get any.

Hey so I found a new bird. Er, I didn’t discover a brand new bird, but rather, one that is new to me — one who roamed idly into view as I was standing there. So here I present, the yellow-rumped warbler. SONGBIRD OF THE GILDED BUTT. I’m really quite fond of that photo.

I have a bread problem. I real damn bread problem. So you remember how I did the obvious thing and cultivated a sourdough starter? Yeah, I’ve baked with it every day since. I’ve made two loaves with just starter, then another “noir” loaf with chocolate and walnuts, and with the discard I made rolls, and I made waffles. The rolls were sublime, truly some of the greatest I have ever eatenthe waffles I usually make. The waffles were… fine, not great, totally edible but inferior to , which are murderiferously good. Then I bought two 10-lb bags of flour (soft wheat and hard bolted wheat) from a local mill and seriously, I have a problem. That problem is bread. And probably diabetes, soon? Can you grow meat from a sourdough starter? Or Impossible Burgers? (Oh, these are the rolls, btw.)

I guess a meat shortage might be a thing? We get most of our meat from local providers, which is nice in that a) I’m supporting people near me and b) they’re not big factory farms subject to the problems those have. Not to say “small farmers” are automagically better people or better places, but on a whole I find they are, if only because you can go there, and see the operation, and talk to the farmers. We did try when this all started to buy a freezer and hahahaha that was fucking stupid. In mid-March, the earliest we could get one delivered was April 28th, and you’ll note that April 28th has come and gone. Our new delivery date is June 15th, so, yeah. Somewhere there’s like, one guy with a thousand freezers he’s using to keep all his toilet paper cold. The fucker.

Also, Pepcid? So someone said that famotidine cures The Cove, The Rona, The Vid, and now people are hoarding that even though the off-chance of it working means you’d need to have it delivered to you via IV, which is not what you buy from Target, you dicks. I could use my heartburn meds just for heartburn. Anxiety heightens heartburn. And heartburn heightens anxiety! Fun.

My anxiety is quieter, though, these days. That feels weird, but I think it’s smug. Self-righteous. “See, I told you this shit would happen,” it says, rocking back on its heels like a too-proud child. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back later. For now, just pickle in the world I told you would arrive.”

Some injuries are funny. I’m sorry, it’s just true. For instance, this thread where I asked last night, hey, what’s your weirdest or most embarrassing injury? It’s got 3,000 responses and hooooooly shit.

Wanderers in paperback. Boom, you just got suckered into reading a sales pitch. You fools. Ahem. No, seriously, Wanderers? It’s coming out in paperback this month. Aaaaand I don’t know if that’s gonna work or not, because print is weird right now? But if you’re so inclined to grab a copy, your local indie store would surely welcome that business. So would Doylestown Books, where you can pre-order it. Comes out May 19th. Tell your friends! And your vague acquaintances!

We’re okay here. Again, lucky and privileged and mostly fine. A lot of floating. Distance learning is hard — everything feels like homework for the kid, because now, everything is homework, and his bedroom is his classroom, and that just sucks. It’s nobody’s fault. Everybody’s doing their best. But it’s definitely an act of jogging on a fractured leg, and everyone pretending that, nope, you’re just supposed to run like that, it’s fine, the herky-jerky gait is normal, keep running, it won’t hurt, ow, ow, ow. We got toilet paper. We went from none to a lot in short order? We have food, though what’s available week to week is erratic and odd. I’m trying to cook healthy meals, but veggies have been the real hard one to get — we’re trying Misfits Market for the next month until the CSA we subscribed to kicks into gear. These are all very privileged problems, I know. Just the same, things are weird, and the industry in which I work is going through some paroxysms, and as the country’s economy wavers, so too do theoretically luxury items like books and… well, just grabbing onto the cliff’s edge as tight as I can, is all. As I imagine most of us are doing. I think that’s it. I’m out. Here are dogs.

Trina Warren didn’t think she was going to be a hero. She thought she was going to go to fourth period, hopefully avoiding any more hassle from the jocks about dropping their plates at her waitressing job the night before. Then there was a bang, and an overturned chair, and everything was different.

Now Trina finds herself in a fantasy world, pursued by a faceless, nameless monster that only she can stop. But she doesn’t know how to stop it, she doesn’t have any weapons, and her only clue is the necklace that arrived in a mysterious package that morning, with no return address and a cryptic note inside. She must navigate an unfamiliar world full of monsters, magic, and danger if she is to defeat the mysterious Soulless One and save her friends. And herself.

* * *

In extraordinary circumstances, ordinary people show themselves to be extraordinary

Just under a year ago I survived a mass shooting on the campus of the university where I teach. I say survived, but that feels wrong. I mean, it’s not like I got shot. I was in a building a couple over from where the attack began where I hid in a locked room with my students. Though it took a couple of hours for us to be freed by the police, the incident itself was over very quickly. We just didn’t know it. For us it was two hours of watching our (muted) phones, trying to figure out what was going on and just how much danger we were in, and listening for footsteps outside. What we learned later is that the speed with which the police were able to take charge of the situation was due to the actions of one of the victims, Riley Howel who overpowered the shooter, running at him, and taking eight bullets to various parts of his body. Eight bullets, and he kept going, driven by what? I can barely imagine. In those horrific moments his will power, courage, greatness of heart—call it what you like—allowed most of the other students in that room to get out alive.

Writing is my way through trauma

Not for the first time in my life I came out of a bad situation with the need to talk about it not as it actually happened, but through the distorting lens of fiction. I did it after my wife’s cancer. I did it after the death of my father. And I did it after this glimpse of the appalling fragility of normal life. It’s a fantasy novel, swords and sorcery meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer, except that it’s finally not at all. It’s about the terrible and arbitrary ordinariness of certain kinds of violence. And I’m not kidding when I said I needed to write it. At the time I was ok, but within a few days I was very clearly not. I would suddenly be overcome with grief, panic or terror. I wrote the first draft in two breathless weeks, and felt a little better.

I’m not interested in purely escapist fantasy

I‘ve known this for a while but it has been a little surprising nonetheless. I always loved the idea of books which took you away from the real world and put your everyday problems on hold, but as I’ve got older I’ve found that less and less satisfying. Yes, I love the unreal, the paranormal, the magical, the preposterous in art, but somewhere deep inside, like the flaw at the heart of a crystal, I like to feel that for all its un reality those TV shows, movies and books all tap into something real, something true. I’m quite capable of investing in the strictly imaginary, but I like that imaginary to have just enough of a tether to the life I lead that some subconscious part of me will make use of it as I wrestle with ordinary issues.

There’s no such thing as apolitical fiction

My other fiction has similar handholds on reality and it can piss people off. I saw a one star Amazon review for one of my Steeplejack books which actually raised the outraged question: why put politics in fantasy? To which I say, because that’s where we live, and when authors say they don’t put politics in their fiction it’s because they are either writing about a place which bears no resemblance to the world or because they think that politics is for other people. The Steeplejack example is a case in point. It was read (rightly) as political because it was about racial struggle in an unequal society, something some people would prefer not to think about, usually because they aren’t the ones being disenfranchised by such inequality. For me, ignoring such things is political; it’s wishful thinking of a particularly insidious kind. So yes, people will attack Impervious for being a political book. Fine. Show me a book that isn’t, and I’ll show you a book so utterly divorced from reality that I have no interest in it.

You can’t please everyone

No surprise there. What I realized in writing this book, however, is that the desire to please everyone is not just foolish, it’s cowardly. You have to pick your battles, for sure, but there should be a point where you say, this is the hill I’m prepared to die on. Hell, if Riley Howel can take eight bullets to save his classmates, I ought to be able to write a damn novel with an ounce of integrity, and if I can’t, I should hang it up.

* * *

Author A.J. Hartley is the bestselling writer of mystery/thriller, fantasy, historical fiction, and young adult novels. He was born in northern England, but has lived in many places including Japan, and is currently the Robinson Professor of Shakespeare studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, where he specializes in the performance history, theory and criticism of Renaissance English drama, and works as a director and dramaturg.

AJ Hartley: Website

Impervious: Amazon | Everywhere Else

Sooooo, hey, look at that? If you’ll remember a little while ago I tweeted that I’d written a middle grade about a girl who inherits a funeral home and cemetery for monsters? Welp, it sold! And here I’m able to announce that Dust & Grim is the first SEEEECRET BOOOOK I had waiting in the wings.

(Only three more to announce!)

I’m excited to see how people react to this — it’s very plainly a kids’ book, as I wanted to write something in line with what my son could read by the time he’s of that age, and this should time out pretty well for that. I’m in the middle of editing the book now, and am very pleased to be working with Deirdre Jones, who like my Del Rey editor Tricia has sought to bring out the best version of the vision I’m putting into the book, which is to me the ideal editor-author relationship. Thanks to Deirdre and LB for wanting this book, and for my wonderagent, Stacia Decker, for helping deliver that deal. Hopefully you all will dig it. We initially considered using a pseudonym for it, but there was the feeling that though I’m traditionally an adult author (though I’ve written YA, and those books are on sale this month at Amazon, btw) with a adult social media presence, it shouldn’t impact what kids that age look for or care about. But maybe that’ll change and you’ll find this book coming out under my carefully-crafted pseudonym, RICK RIORDAN. I don’t think anyone has taken that one yet! Failing that, I could always go with the name of my great grand-uncle, JOHN KENNEY ROWLING, though I think it’d be classier to use the first two initials? Whatever.

More as I have it, folks.

Also P.S. the name Michelle under that photo is not my name, but rather, the photographer credit.