Once again, the big delicious cookie of a blog post I might have once planned has been stepped on and broken into fragments. A crime, to be sure, for now it is all crumbs, but just the same, crumbs is what I got. Please enjoy the broken bits.

Fiona Apple has a new album out wait what? I knew there was an album coming, as I’d read it in Emily Nussbaum’s phenomenal piece on Apple earlier this year. But I didn’t know the album would just one day be a thing I could have. And now I have it? And it’s amazing?! Okay, listen, Idler Wheel is probably one of my favorite albums of all time. A top tenner. It is raw-boned and throaty and barely constrained in its willing derangement, and it speaks to me in a thousand different ways. So I’m digging into this new one and finding it has its own lunacy — it’s a bit quirkier, but still feels like someone took their heart and their brain and blended them up in a Vitamix and dumped it on a countertop. It’s wonderful. More fun and less flensing than Idler Wheel, but still toothy as shit. Got bite. Got little shrieks. Got dog barks. Pitchfork gave it a rare 10, if you care about that sort of thing.

I remember how I found Fiona Apple. I mean, I didn’t “discover” her and give her to the world or anything. I was working in college for a coffee house — Dillworth, in Charlotte, NC — and we of course played a lot of “coffee house” music. (Think, y’know, Lilith Fair and weird jazz.) We would get random CD deliveries from… honestly, I’ve no idea who. Music companies? Demons? Whatever. They’d deliver weekly stacks of CDs and nine times out of ten they were half-shit. But one time, in the stack came Tidal. And I was working a shift with my good friend and roommate Jim at the time, and we put it in and… I dunno how many times during our shift we listened to it, but I knew it made me feel the same way I felt when I listened to, say, Portishead’s Dummy. And we were like, fuck this, this is too good for the coffee house. So, we took it. And listened to it constantly. Her work since then has been a journey, each album still irrevocably her, but each album also very much its own creature.

I aspire to have my books be that, by the way. I never found genre to be a thing I wanted to be trapped in, or by, but I also want you to read one of my novels and know it’s one of mine, and have it feel like I’m my own damn genre, even if the genre is sci-fi, or horror, or fantasy, or whatfuckingever. Which also is why I can see how some people bristled at the Aftermath series — I mean, besides the usual shitbirds who had problems with the ahh, “content” in terms of who is allowed on the page. But I remember reading a forum post at one point where someone lamented, “Doesn’t he [i.e. me] understand, all we read are Star Wars novels?” and that clarified a lot of things for me. I wasn’t just writing a Star Wars novel. I couldn’t. I had to still write a “me” novel, otherwise, what’s the fucking point? It’s my name on it, too. I have to own it. And that’s my feeling on all my books — that’s me on there, that’s my name, it has to be all of what I bring to the table. Which then makes me think, what are all the authorial things I’m bringing to the table without realizing it? Common themes, but also lazy bits? Hmm. Worth more study. When I’m not trapped in lockdown. This fragile era is not the best time for putting the self under the lens, maybe. Or maybe it is. Who knows.

Oh, to explain the aforementioned dog barks. Yeah, no, it literally has dog barks in it, the new album. It’s the perfect lockdown quarantine album. Because it feels like she just recorded it all last night, in a binge, in her house. (I think she actually did record a lot of it in her house.) Her dogs sometimes bark. It’s amazing. (And for the record, I know she didn’t just record it last night. Its chaos is far too artful — the power of it being in how it feels improvised and mad, but is no such thing. It is her design.)

Pennsylvania is champing at the bit to “reopen.” Which is, at this point, delusional, but never underestimate people’s ability to misread a moment. See, here in PA things aren’t as “bad” as people thought, so like the Y2k bug, you have people claiming it’s either a hoax or that people got it “wrong,” despite the fact that PA arguably did a lot more a lot earlier, and has since clamped down on some of the worst of things. (Also don’t forget, we’re still not testing like we should be. So the true numbers are wildly unclear.) To reopen everything, you gotta go slow, methodical, and increase testing or get antibody testing in play. But you have the local Republicans just wanting to hee-haw their way into kicking the doors open for everyone to come rushing in, back to business. Which will cause a certain spike and surge, because, a-duhhh, the virus didn’t magically go away. Listen, I want shit to get back to normal, too. But we cannot just ignore experts and embrace magical thinking just because we want businesses open. We need better leadership from the top that helps people weather this storm in a way that doesn’t just toss vulnerable folks into the pyre in the name of Mammon, for Chrissakes.

Just the same, I guess we’re doing okay here. I got yeast, thanks to a friend who did a driveby driveway drop-off. We stood 20 feet apart and yelled conversations to one another. It was both nice and super weird. With yeast, I guess I’ll now try my hand at bread like every other carboloading individual out there. If you have good bread recipes, hook me up, because I’ve zero idea what I’m doing.

We have VR, an Oculus Quest, and it’s great. This should be the Quest’s shining moment, because VR actually feels a little bit like an escape (and you can see how Ready Player One actually comes to be). But the supply chain is disrupted and the Quest is hard to get at a meaningful price so, oops. But there are some truly spectacular experiences for it. I need the new Half-Life, but it isn’t on Quest natively, and I don’t have a PC that will load or run it. Is now a good time to get back into PC gaming? Probably not, and yet, I wanna? Because I’m an idiot?

Speaking of apples, since apparently I like anything with the word “apple” in it: did you see about the lost apples, rediscovered? Or there’s this video of an apple detective. Which is what I wanna be when I grow up. I’ll be DETECTIVE COXWORTH “GOLDEN DELICIOUS” PIPPIN, aka “Doc Pippin” for short. I will solve all the apple mysteries. This is my design.

Got me a birthday next week. In the middle of all this, a fuckin’ birthday. That should be illegal. Also illegal: our current autocratic government ineptly and cruelly stomping on all our norms and freedoms. But also, the birthday thing.

Maybe next week I can announce a cool thing? Maybe I can tell you about one of my secret books. Maybe. We’ll see. No promises. Time is goopy. Everything is wet paint.

And now, a bird photo. It’s an oafish cardinal yelling HEY at you. And not a friendly hey but like a HEY QUIT LEANIN ON MY CAR, YOU JABRONI.

Empire. Revolution. Magic.

Gerrit is the son of Bourshkanya’s Supreme-General. Despite his powerful storm-affinity and the State’s best training, he can’t control his magic. To escape the brutal consequences, he flees.

Celka is a travelling circus performer, hiding both her link to the underground and her storm-affinity from the prying eyes of the secret police. But Gerrit’s arrival threatens to expose everything: her magic, her family, and the people they protect.

The storms have returned, and everything will change.

***

People can believe in terrible things.

I wanted Weave the Lightning’s government to be scary—secret police bursting into your house in the middle of the night kind of scary. But that has a lot of wiggle room. In an early draft, I explored a Soviet-style dictatorship where it didn’t matter how clear your party affiliation, you could still be targeted and everyone lived in fear. This created an obvious villain, but it also left basically no one “good” on the dictator’s side.

I discovered it’s more interesting when people have good reasons take different sides. (I mean, maybe they’re not Good reasons with a capital ‘G’, but at least understandable ones.)

This led me to a fascist state, where plenty of zealots believe the party line. They support the regime not out of fear of what happens if they don’t but because they believe. Maybe they think they’ll get something out of it, maybe they have a grudge against the people the regime is villainizing, maybe they just want to belong and they see the regime as a powerful force they can be part of. Regardless, there’s a strong belief that the regime is right, that it’s necessary. It may not be pretty, but what can you do when enemies are breathing down your neck?

The trick then was figuring out the kind of character who could have been steeped in that belief but have a chance to escape it. What would it take to kick the State’s conditioning? How would that belief erode, and what would it leave behind?

In Weave the Lightning, this character is Gerrit. He’s the youngest son of the Supreme-General, and he’s a mage trained in a top military academy. But he never managed to gain his father’s respect, and he can’t help challenging stupid orders. When the ability to create new magic returns to the world, some serious shit starts to go down, and it sets Gerrit on a path of questioning his deeply engrained beliefs. This leads to an interesting journey and a complex character—a richness I lacked when the regime was just the Big Bad.

People are complicated; so, too, magic.

Complex magic makes my brain sing. I love when the magic feels organic, an outgrowth of nature with deep roots. People work to understand it—they come up with theories, and those theories yield practical results. But as with science, we don’t know everything. There’s always more to discover.

Magic has one up on technology, in my opinion, in that it can be personal. With tech, you press a button and your computer turns on; it doesn’t matter if you’re in the right headspace. With magic, it’s not necessarily so easy—and from this, organic complexity can arise.

Building in this personal element, however, turns out to be… challenging. I describe the details of my magic system on my website, but one central element is the “neighboring reality” where magic is formed, a place of needs and ideas and emotion. It appears as a full-blown alternate world for those strong enough to see it but, because it arises from the mage’s internal landscape, it’s different for everyone.

This turned out to be a pain in the ass. It’s cool, don’t get me wrong. I love how it makes magic deeply personal. But inventing complex characters is hard enough on its own; digging into their psychology to manifest their emotional world… oof. Sometimes I hate past Corry.

Sometimes, you just have to explain.

Writers are often warned about the perils of exposition. “Show, don’t tell” is the knee-jerk adage. But sometimes, you really do need to tell.

Figuring out the right balance is hard—not least because the balance is different for everyone. I personally like figuring things out from subtle incluing. I’ve also been reading spec fic since I could sound out words on the page, so I have a vast cannon I can call on to understand new worlds, and I love when tropes are turned on their heads. Other readers may not work that way. One fabulous writer my year at the Odyssey Writing Workshop (which is specifically for spec fic writers) didn’t know that to kill a zombie you had to destroy their brain.  People have gaps.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that my early drafts of Weave the Lightning suffered from a complex magic system and an (utter) lack of reader hand-holding. I got better. I learned that exposition, when used sparingly, is a wonderful tool.

I still trust my reader to figure things out alongside my characters… I’ve just added enough waypoints to make it so they can.

And for readers who prefer an explanation up front, I put a magic primer on my website.

Break open your reveals.

I live for narrative moments when characters discover that things not what they believed—the surprising reveal that slots everything before it into place; the discovery that flings a character on a new path. I planned several for Weave the Lightning, and they were awesome. My readers were going to love them.

When an early critique said, “Gerrit doesn’t have time to react to [awesome reveal],” I was confused. That reveal set him on a new course! It changed everything about how he viewed his life before! What did she mean he didn’t have time to react? Clearly that comment was garbage.

It took me over a year to understand. When I did, it blew my mind and reshaped the book.

What my clever friend (Kate Alice Marshall, whose books I highly recommend) was trying to tell me was that I had a multi-stage reveal smashed into a single moment. Gerrit discovered something really big about his past, but that discovery came at the same time as he learned something else plot-shaking. I had done something similar with Celka later in the book. Because I had conceived of each “reveal” all at once, I saw each as a single point, when in reality they were complex. (As a physicist, I feel I should use the analogy of an atom that seems indivisible until you reach higher energies and discover it is actually made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. And those, in turn, are composed of…)

Getting back to reveals…

By unknotting the multiple threads that made up each reveal, my characters could uncover clues and piece them together throughout the story, building up to those earth-shattering moments. This gave them space to react to each component of the reveal (you’re welcome, Kate), and brought the reader along for the ride.

It’s okay to trash a draft.

And trash it again. And again.

I have this dream that one day I’ll write a book and I won’t end up throwing the whole thing away and rewriting from a blank page. *wistful sigh*

Like many daydreams, in my heart of hearts, I’m not sure I believe it.

I hear other authors talk about writing their first draft, doing some minor revisions, and publishing it. I’m not that writer. Often I wish I was. It seems so much simpler, so much more efficient! If only I could plan things out well enough ahead of time, maybe I could become that writer!

Bah.

I number my revisions like software. Version 2.3 is, for example, the third major rewrite (I start at version 0), with its fourth minor rewrite. When I blow the whole thing up, it gets a new version number. Weave the Lightning reached version 9.

And that’s okay.

***

Corry L. Lee is a science fiction and fantasy writer, Ph.D. physicist, award-winning science educator, data geek, and mom. Weave the Lightning is her debut novel. Her science fiction short story “Shutdown” won the Writers of the Future award.

In Ph.D. research at Harvard, she shed light on the universe fractions of a second after the Big Bang. At Amazon, she connected science to technology, improving customer experience through online experimentation.

Everything Corry does, she does with intensity. Currently, she’s obsessed with cross-country skiing, French pop music, and single origin coffee.

Corry L. Lee: Website | Twitter

Weave the Lightning: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound | Powell’s

Someone, or something, is haunting the ship. Between mysterious disappearances and sudden deaths, the guests of the Titanic have found themselves suspended in an eerie, unsettling twilight zone from the moment they set sail. Several of them, including maid Annie Hebley, guest Mark Fletcher, and millionaires Madeleine Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim, are convinced there’s something sinister–almost otherwordly–afoot. But before they can locate the source of the danger, as the world knows, disaster strikes.

Years later, Annie, having survived that fateful night, has attempted to put her life back together. Working as a nurse on the sixth voyage of the Titanic‘s sister ship, the Britannic, newly refitted as a hospital ship, she happens across an unconscious Mark, now a soldier fighting in World War I. At first, Annie is thrilled and relieved to learn that he too survived the sinking, but soon, Mark’s presence awakens deep-buried feelings and secrets, forcing her to reckon with the demons of her past–as they both discover that the terror may not yet be over.

* * *

IT COULD’VE BEEN WORSE. AT LEAST I WASN’T A DEBUT AUTHOR.

The Deep is my fifth novel, so not my first rodeo, as the kids say. Honestly, this was the first time that I wasn’t a wreck come pub date. I’d practiced my book tour talk until it was almost memorized. Picked out my tour clothes. Had worked with my publicist on advance work like writing blog posts and doing interviews via email. We had promises of more media in the pipeline. My last book, The Hunger, a reimagining of the story of the Donner Party with a horror twist, had done well. My publisher and I both had high hopes for The Deep. We were eager to get started.

For your first book, launch is a time of uber high emotions, a metric ton of expectations, but no first-hand experience. You don’t know if everything that happens to you is the norm or something that should worry you. By book five, you know the traumas and joys of past launches. Kinda like, if you had four kids, for the fifth one you don’t even sweat the epidural.

For debut authors trying to launch a book in the time of COVID-19: Please please please be easy on yourselves and don’t be overwhelmed by the many conflicting emotions you’re probably feeling. It won’t be like this the next time. And there will be a next time. Put the gun/bottle/eighth box of chocolates down.

THERE IS NO SCENARIO IN WHICH IT DOESN’T ALL GO TO SHIT AT FIRST

A few days before I was to go on tour, there was a quick huddle with the publishing team and my agents. Optimism was high. Then, almost as an afterthought, I asked if anyone suggested that we cancel the tour. There was an uneasy pause, then I was told, no. I’d only asked because, at the time, things were just starting to be postponed, major events where crowds were expected. Mine were hardly in the same category, and I felt a little silly mentioning it.

The ironic thing is that for many years, I ran crisis support teams for the Department of Defense during humanitarian crises and natural disasters. I can tell you first hand that when a crisis hits, there is always confusion. Even when there is a plan in place. Even if you’ve been through it a dozen times, because no two disasters are exactly the same.

That confusion is super frustrating. You want to to be proactive, to fix this thing, not to be standing still when every fiber of your being tells you to do something. But, instead, everything is one big flail. Don’t fight the flail. It’ll exhaust you. Take a breath, let people get their equilibrium. (Though if you recognize that someone on your team has become paralyzed by fear or is overwhelmed, and then just give that person direction and they’ll come back to themselves eventually.)

BREAK OUT THE LEMONADE RECIPE

So, there I was heading to the airport to go home, with a book out for two whole days and no plans for how to promote it. Press had evaporated. No one, it seemed, was interested in anything other than the coronavirus. My publisher, along with everyone else, was scrambling to figure out how to sell books. Bookstores, a big part of how we reach readers, especially new ones, were scrambling to invent new business models.  Online sales, curbside pick-up, door-to-door deliveries. All author events were cancelled, but it seemed like in a matter of hours they started looking at the internet, asking what could be done in virtual space. Stores that had never done a video were wondering how to replicate their store programming on the internet.

When life gives you lemons, you really have no alternative but to make lemonade. Sulking over the unfairness of life is not going to work, not for your book, not for your publisher.

There has been no shortage of creative solutions from authors or bookstores. I looked at what other people were doing and picked the things that worked for me. Not every store is going to have space for you on their roster, you have to accept that. But you can do things for youself. It meant learning all about live streaming. It meant stepping up my social media game, learning the little tricks of each platform so that my content shined.

However, social media is not a static target. Audiences are fickle. What delights one day is a bore the next. You must constantly think of ways to keep things fresh. My novel is a reimagining of the sinking of the Titanic and its sister ship, the Britannic, so history is understandably a big part of its appeal. So I’m trying to partner with other Titanic authors and historical societies. I’ve tried focusing on one or another famous historical person in the book, tweeting rare photos and bits of trivia, for instance. There are theme days on Instagram. It’s a constant challenge to draw eyeballs. And you can’t stop feeding the beast, which is stressful.

FRIENDS GOT YOUR BACK

While I was cheerfully (or pseudo-cheerfully) posting on Instagram campfire and making live streams, I did let slip one day on Twitter that this was all really, really hard and wasn’t what I’d hoped for my book baby, and I needed to go off to feel sorry for myself for a spell. I felt like I had to be honest.

The response was tremendous. In addition to some top notch commiserating and other wonderful statements of support, many people came through with offers to help. Let me interview you for my blog. Come on my podcast. Join me on my live stream. Participate in our live streamed group reading.

Feeling that I wasn’t alone made it easier for me to reach out to others to see if they wanted to partner up. For instance, I’m doing a joint live stream with an author whose non-fiction work on the Titanic I’ve admired a lot. We’re going to answer questions about fact and fiction about the Titanic, something that would never have happened if we were doing things the old way because he lives in England and I’m in the U.S.

ACCEPT THAT IT WON’T BE PERFECT. SOMETIMES IT WON’T EVEN BE GOOD

If you’re a hard charger (which I’m guessing you must be, or you wouldn’t try to make a living writing books), you’re wired to think you can power through this. You are going to grit your teeth and not only get through this, but you’re going to make it your bitch. You are going to butt-kick this disaster into doing your bidding.

But that’s not healthy.

Trust me. I have seen villages wiped out by earthquakes or a warring ethnic group. There are some things that can’t be forced into submission, wrongs that can’t be undone with willpower and a can-do attitude alone.

The odds of “winning” in the time of coronavirus are zero. Accept this. This is an extraordinary global event—don’t drive yourself crazy or to the point of weepy exhaustion. Don’t break your neck running into the same unbudging wall over and over.

The only thing you can do to avoid later regret, I think, is to do the best you can while listening to your inner self. To walk away when you need a break. To remind yourself that the old normal will return, that there will be another chance. Have faith that eventually this will pass, and we’ll pick up the pieces and start over.

* * *

Alma Katsu is the author of five novels. Her latest is The Deep, a reimagining of sinking of the Titanic and its sister ship, the Britannic. Her previous novel The Hunger, a reimagining of the story of the Donner Party with a horror twist, made NPR’s list of the 100 Best Horror Stories, was named one of the best novels of 2018 by several media outlets and book stores, and was nominated for a Stoker and Locus Award for best horror novel. During her long career in intelligence for the U.S. government, she worked through many man-made and natural disasters including the avian and swine flu pandemics, the Indian Ocean tsunami, and genocides in Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Bosnia. COVID-19 is the first one where she gets to stay home.

Alma Katsu: Website | Twitter

The Deep: Indiebound | Amazon

Psst. I’m over at Reddit Books today — pop over now, ask some questions. I’ll swing by shortly, and A all your Qs. We can talk about Wanderers, or pandemic self-care, or Animal Crossing, or whatever the sweet hot hell you so choose. Here’s the link. See you over there, word nerds.