I feel like the post title says it all, but you can grab Wanderers (not The Wanderers, FYI) on e-book currently for $3.99. You can nab it on Kindle, on Kobo, on Dasher, on Dancer, on Apple Books, on B&N, and probably other e-book places that exist that I’m forgetting about?

You can, of course, still procure it at your favorite indie store if you’d like a physical copy — and the paperback is on preorder, too. Many indie stores ship, including my locals, Doylestown Bookshop and Let’s Play Books. You can also use Indiebound.org and Bookshop.org to buy via local indies. You can even use Libro.FM to grab the audiobook and give back to indie bookstores.

Publishing is in a tough space right now. Every business needs human beings to operate them, and as social distancing strains the workforce, it narrows all channels for books to squeeze through. Which cascades through to publishing employees, authors, bookstore employees, librarians, and so forth. I don’t say to buy books as an act of charity, but ideally, also because you’re getting BOOKS out of it, and if you don’t love books, you’re a heartless banal monster.

Some other places where I am existing currently:

Me and Rob Hart talking about, oops, we wrote predictive novels.

Then, a Reddit fantasy panel where me, Malka Older, Mike Chen, Sarah Pinsker and Sabrina Vourvoulias talk about… oops, we wrote predictive novels.

Then, me and Gary Whitta talk about what it takes to maintain creativity and productivity during a time like this — and also how, fuck it, who said you even have to maintain that?

I swing by the Well, This Isn’t Normal podcast with Sara Benincasa…

Finally, I popped by VE Schwab’s Instagram yesterday to talk about… well, books, writing, writing careers, everything, as the opening guest to her wonderful No Write Way program. I think she’s gonna archive it too somehow, so I’ll drop a better link when I have it.

A reminder too that I’m on Instagram, @chuck_wendig.

I also hooked up my podcast mic, so I’m investigating ways to use that and reach out to THE WORLD BEYOND, who knows how? Maybe I’ll forget the mic and will engage with you PSYCHICALLY in your DREAMS.

More as I have it.

Stay safe, stay sane, be good to each other, be good to yourselves.

Read books, you glorious dorks.

In this time of pandemic fuckery, the book publication situation is a goofed up. Release events are canceled, for one. No tours or anything. And that sucks. You’re an author! You’ve written a book! That’s exciting. It is deserving of as much pomp and circumstance as you can muster, and one must not let a rampaging disease strangle your delight — or your release — with a wet towel.

So, currently I’ve not much to offer, but I do reminder that I have slots available here at the blog for a FIVE THINGS I LEARNED WRITING [Insert Your Book Name Here] post on the week of your release. The way these work are:

You email me at terribleminds at gmail the following:

– Your book’s jacket copy/description.

– An author bio.

– A link to a high-res graphic of your cover, or an emailed JPEG of that cover, under 2MB in size.

– Then, a post where you detail five things you learned while writing your newest book. These do not have to be writing-related things, though they certainly can be. They can be about cool research (“I learned whales hate Swedes”) or even things you learned about yourself (“I can’t start my writing day until I have eaten an entire pork loin in one bite”). Each of these five things is given a leader (aka, the thing you learned) and then following are one to several paragraphs about that thing. No limit on post length, though my guideline is usually: if it’s under 1k, it might be too light, if it’s over 2k, it might be too beefy. Be earnest or funny or interesting. Don’t go into “sell sell sell” mode.

– Links to your author pages (bare minimum: a website and Twitter address).

– Links to your book’s purchase pages, bare minimum one from Indiebound, another from Amazon.

Now, for the post itself?

A good example is right here.

When you send it, I’d like it in .doc or .rtf.

Do not copy it into the body of the email.

I’d like minimal formatting: no italics, no bold, no headers, nothing. If the five things items are not clear that they’re the five things, just number them. (I might pull the numbers out for posting because I think it looks better). Also, no carriage returns between lines — I don’t need a blank line (return/enter) between paragraphs. Means I just have to hand-delete them, and in a bigger post, that’s a pain in the butthole.

Try to get me all of this the week before your release. By Thursday of the week prior to your book coming out. And that’s it. It won’t solve your lack of in-person promotion, to be sure, but I have a mailing list here of 11k and more who come to the blog without subscribing, so you at least catch some eyeballs, maybe? I’m far likelier to lean into traditionally-published authors because, real talk, I cannot always confirm the quality of indie books in advance of the post, and further, it’s those traditional authors whose releases are most disrupted right now.

Certainly, if authors don’t wanna ping me, publishers or agents can, too — just know that I also have aggressive spam filters on, so hopefully I’ll catch whatever gets caught in ’em.

Note, too, if you’re a person who has already done a FIVE THINGS post for an earlier book, you’re certainly welcome to submit a guest post of your own choosing? Your call!

Onward we go, folks!

In April of 2016, a weasel (technically a stone marten) went and fucked the hadron collider (technically chewed a wire), and ever since, we’ve been routinely time tunneling our way through iteratively worse timelines. From Trump’s election to right now, a pandemic in which we are all forced to remain inside our little territorial bubbles lest we catch the Cove, the Rona, the dreaded virus, and pass it along to others.

It wasn’t normal in 2016 when Trump was elected.

And we are a thousand — a hundred thousand — miles from normal now.

And yet, we’re expected to carry on, like we can respond to this with increased normalcy as a counterbalance. Writers will write more. We can cook more. We can clean and organize more. We have a lot of free time now and so we will use it, like industrious ants, like worker bees. But that’s bullshit. It’s not easy to just “carry on.” It’s like sitting at your desk at work and seeing a co-worker suddenly hike down his pants and shit in his little trash can. You can’t simply shrug that off and be like, “That Gary always finds his own path!” and then keep filling in the fucking spreadsheet on the screen in front you. A man just shat in a trashcan in the next goddamn cubicle. You have to acknowledge that. You have to stop and deal with that.

The situation outside our door is considerably more upsetting than Gary’s little “cubicle toilet,” and so you should not be expected to simply go about your day as if, gosh, I’ll be so productive now. I can do so many things! THIS IS ALL PERFECTLY FINE, you say through clenched and cracking teeth, eyes twitching and wet with tears, one snot bubble balloon inflating and deflating at your nostril’s entrance like you’re a cartoon character.

I’ll give you an example —

We went for a walk the other day. It was up a little backroad, and it’s a particularly nice walk. Bridges over creeks, a lot of forest, a lot of big rocks and such.

Except, that day it was not a particularly nice walk.

Why?

We were not the only humans who thought it would be. It’d be hyperbole to say it was packed, but there were a lot of walkers. And the road is narrow. And some people are good at social distancing, and others, nyyyeaaaah, not so much. We’d be walking up and see people agglomerating in the middle of the road like cholesterol clogging an artery, and we’d slow our walk in the hopes that, like human Lipitor we’d break up this oleaginous chunk of people and could continue properly social distancing, but still they gather, still they chatter. So as I got closer I kinda cleared my throat and made it sound a little like a cough, and that was enough to spook them like startled squirrels, and onward we could go. But then someone on a bike (decked out like they’re sponsored for the Tour de Fucking France) would zip by right past us, and you feel like, as they’re zooming by what if they cough, what if they just fire off a wicked aerosolized viral rocket and oh god now we’re sick. One guy on a bike slowed down to talk to us and he’s like HEY BE CAREFUL THERE’S A DEAD RAT UP AHEAD, and it’s like, who gives a shit? Get out of here, you mobile outbreak monkey. What’s the dead rat gonna do? Is it a zombie? Does it have coronavirus? (Spoiler warning: it also wasn’t a dead rat. It was a squirrel. What a dingle.)

So, what should’ve been a very nice walk was actually quite stressful.

Point being, this grasp for normalcy only heightened how deeply fucking weird everything is. And the response to that can’t be to intensify normalcy. You cannot meet abnormality with increased normalcy. It just doesn’t work. There’s no countermanding it that way. We’re told we can be more productive, that we’re all work-from-home now, but lemme tell you: this isn’t your average way to work-from-home. This isn’t how to accelerate productivity. It’s like being told to work-from-home during a locust plague and a forest fire. “Just sit there and do the work, head down, don’t look outside, definitely don’t match eyes with Baalzebub, who is currently stalking the neighborhood next door with a SCYTHE made of BITING FLIES. It’s fine! Ha ha ha! Haven’t you always wanted to learn how to crochet? Now’s the time! Just ignore the screaming!”

It’s hard to concentrate when everything is so strange, so broken, so dangerous. It’s like being told to paint a masterpiece while on a turbulent flight. It’s just not the time.

And so, I want you to know, you shouldn’t expect yourself to be somehow a better, more productive person in this time. You can be! If you are, more power to you. That doesn’t make you a monster. But if you’re finding yourself unable to concentrate, that’s to be expected. That is normal. Normal is feeling abnormal in response to abnormality. You must be kind to yourself and to others when it comes to what we think people can and should be able to accomplish during this time. Ten million people are out of work, suddenly. People are sick and dying. The thing we crave at a base level, human interaction, is suddenly fraught and fragile. Hell, everything is fraught and fragile. We’re only realizing now that it was fragile all this time.

None of this is normal. You don’t have to feel shamed into forcing normalcy as a response.

So, what then, is the answer?

There really isn’t one. There’s no playbook for this sort of thing. No therapy regimen, no best practices. Best I can tell you, and this should be taken with a grain of salt so big you’d have to chip away at it with a pick ax, is that you try your best. And when you fall well short of that, you instantly and intimately recognize why. And you forgive yourself, and you forgive the rest of the world for also falling short (“rest of the world” does not include politicians or billionaires, by the way), and you try again. And it’s okay if you can’t focus on writing, or reading a book, or planting a garden, or patching drywall, or whatever. Find a different thing. Keep busy when you must, but also don’t be afraid to sit with how you’re feeling and accept it. Accept it unconditionally. Accept your anger and sadness, accept your delirium, allow yourself the time to drift and to fail. Also accept any joy you feel, and do so without guilt. Joy is hard-won, and if you manage that victory, there’s no shame in that. Take the victory lap. We will have to hunt joy like an elusive beast across the wasteland.

If you capture it, celebrate.

I think most of all, just don’t let anyone tell you how to feel. Now, maybe more than ever, don’t compare yourself to others. Everybody’s not only trapped in their houses, but also trapped in their own maelstrom of emotions, too. Let that be true. You can talk it out. You can share how you’re feeling. But don’t compare in a way that punishes you, or that paints your own feelings as a transgression.

This is all very new to us.

Normal is gone. There will be a new normal. We’ll get there. We’ll get through this. But things will change and that’s going to be okay. Maybe better than okay. Maybe we’ll come out better in the end. But we don’t have to be better now, we don’t have to be better overnight. This isn’t work-from-home. This isn’t your time to shine. This isn’t time to be productive. If you are, embrace it. If you’re not, forgive it. Do what you can do. Be safe.

And stop shitting in your trashcan, GARY.

Once again, I return unable or unwilling to write a blog post about one thing, so you get a blog post about several things. Please to enjoy, and feel free to say ‘hi’ in the comments below, let us all know how you’re doing, what you’re up to, if your brain has turned to trash bag juice and started to leak out your ears.

Fuck April Fool’s Day. Is it Fool’s? Fools’? Fools? Whatever, fuck it, it’s awful. It was awful before this year, and now, with us soaking in a pandemic, it’s extra awful. It is a refuge for mediocre pranks performed by people who think they’re funny and brands who are trying to mandate humor as a corporate strategy. It works sometimes, in the hands of a master — someone who doesn’t mock you, or trick you, but makes you laugh in a way that is unexpected, but those people are few and far between, and this year is definitely not a year to try out your HAR HAR I GOT THE RONA joke, Dave. That said, funny is still good, so sure, try to be funny. Share jokes, great. Share a favorite comedian or comedy routine. Just don’t try to “pull one over” on your fellow human beings. We’re fucking fragile over here, Dave. Don’t make us break quarantine to come hit you with a chair.

So, my emotions have stabilized somewhat. Last week, I was on a cocaine roller coaster of feelings, just dipping and diving between the feels, from anger to sadness to panic to weird giddy boilovers. That has stabilized in a way that is both comforting and creepy? I’ve entered into what feels like a sensory deprivation tank. It’s not precisely emotionless, but it is a soft, unfettered place. It is dark and vaguely peaceful while also being mentally moist and… I don’t want to say uncomfortable, but unnerving? Unnerving. That’s the word. But at least Jack Black’s on Tik-Tok.

I’ve tried to up my cooking game. We’re not at the point where I’m trying to do an episode of Chopped or anything (“In your basket are: four ramen flavor packets, a case of Slim Jims, a bag of yellow Skittles, and the last two-ply toilet paper roll in the house. Get cooking!”), but I definitely am feeling more creative. I was watching the Netflix show Chef, which is very good, and I loved that Roy Choi was all about how he doesn’t really make recipes — he just figures out what he has on hand and kinda feels his way through making a meal, knowing what tastes good together, what a dish needs, and so forth. Anyway. Whatever. I did a pork shoulder last night for tacos that was pretty fucking great — 3 lb. shoulder in a pot, homemade chicken stock halfway up the roast, lotta garlic and chili powder and cumin and some Mexican oregano and then a splash of pineapple juice, plus some Seed Ranch umami sauce. Salt, pepper, obvs. Three hours on 275, last hour on 325 with the lid off, just melt in your mouth. Popped it into tacos with some quick-pickled onions. Side dish: black beans with frozen spinach, again some more pineapple juice, garlic, chipotle-in-adobo, salt, pepper, more chili powder and cumin, cooked that for like an hour on low. Really came together. Lime juice splash on everything before eating.

Hot sauces, by the way, can’t be about burning your mouth (and later, your ass) shut. I don’t understand the need to try the hottest fuckin’ hell-sauce. I mean, I get it from a dare standpoint, but my dinners aren’t meant to be dares. I need flavor with that heat. Our current spate of regular-use hot sauces are: Cholula green pepper sauce, Seed Ranch smoked jalapeno, Aardvark Habanero, and of course, motherfucking Gochujang. You want a religious experience, make some mac-and-cheese and then before serving, just splatter it with Gochujang. Hnnngh. What are your go-to hot sauces?

We have VR. Oculus Quest. Hesitant to ever buy into anything Facebook owns, but we got one for Christmas and it ended up being a very good LOCKDOWN item. It’s not a real escape, but it kinda feels like one? GHOST GIANT is a beautiful game, and that’s one of the things about VR — I haven’t found many good “games” yet, in the sense that they are truly game-interesting, but I’ve found a lot of beautiful, artistic experiences. Which ain’t nothing in this day and age. SUPERHOT VR is fucking great, though. I wish it was twice as long as it was.

I want to watch the new Birds of Prey movie. But it’s an R-rated movie and I live in a house with a child who is home all day and I have no time in front of a television that is not family-friendly oh god I just want to watch a movie where they say bad words and shoot people and maybe there are boobs, I dunno. The 8-year-old can watch R-rated movies now, right? Sigh.

We’ve been watching Indiana Jones movies, though. Went through Last Crusade first, which I thought was the most… I dunno, kid-appropriate. Then Raiders. (Kid looked away during the infamous NAZI FACE-MELTING scene.) Skipped Temple of Doom so far because… I mean, first, it’s got a lot of ick-factor, from hearts out to monkey brains and shit. But also, it’s problematic as fuck, and that’s a movie that needs to come with some conversations. So we went to Crystal Skull, and are about 2/3rds through it. It’s both simultaneously better than and worse than I remember. Every good scene is immediately counter-balanced by some campy pulp that plays against the rest of the tone — and that’s the thing, tonally this thing is a pinball. All over the map. And CGI has made it feel small and cheap-looking in places. When it leans into real locations, it plays beautifully under Kaminski’s eye, but otherwise everything feels somehow lessened, like the grandeur and adventure is now video-gamey. But a dude does get disassembled by ants, so that’s not nothing.

Here is where I’m at, by the way. I did Skype a Scientist yesterday, except I’m not a scientist but that’s okay. Video here. Today I live chat with Gary Whitta, and tonight I record a Q&A with author Rob Hart. Friday is a Reddit Fantasy panel about the end of the world, and next week is a Reddit AMA with me. Saturday I’m Instagramming with Victoria Schwab. Links as I have ’em! Also, a reminder that most indie bookstores are open and delivering, so if you’re ever so inclined to check out my books, that’s a good way to help keep indie stores in business.

And that’s all from me.

Here’s a flower.

I am not sure I have it in me today to write a singular blog post about any one thing, and so here I am, writing a blog post about many things. It’s just a tin pail of thought slurry dumped over your poor, unsuspecting heads.

Feel free to sound off in the comments, let us know how you’re holding up.

I saw my first Cooper’s hawk today. I was just standing in the yard taking photos of birbs, and whoosh, the raptor landed in a tree just behind our crabapple. The photo isn’t particularly good, but I mark it for posterity:

Birds in general have been a coping mechanism for me. Whenever I’m feeling anxious or stressed, I go out into the yard, find some birds, give a listen, then I reach out and I eat ’em. I just grab them from the trees like fruit and pop ’em in my mouth and haha no I don’t do that, please don’t call the BIRB POLICE on me. Mostly I listen and watch, maybe snap some pics if I can. The birds seem happy. Spring is here. They don’t give a fuck about our problems, and it helps me give less of a fuck, too.

I don’t know when this all ends. The president’s rhetoric suggests there will be some kind of Easter Miracle, that Jesus will come down and wave his God Wand and it’ll all be okay, then we can all hunt for the eggs that Christ laid across the land from his sacred cloaca. Or whatever that story is. And I think that rhetoric is working a little, too — already I’ve gotten some emails from local businesses that suggest, GONNA BE BACK IN BUSINESS SOON SO GET YOUR WALLETS READY. And I just don’t understand. How do they think this thing is gonna go? Do they think the virus will just fuck off? Meanwhile the rest of us are watching the numbers tick up, up, up, and we’re seeing the USA become the epicenter of the disease, and there are people who really think we will somehow just magically snap back into normalcy. At least some Republican dickheads are being honest and saying that we’re gonna have to sacrifice people on the altar of Mammon to get back to business — “Sure, people will die, but you don’t want to miss out on enriching my 401K!” says some bloviating fucksack. “We all have to do our part dying for the Almighty Dollar.”

I’m suddenly glad I don’t have a book out this summer, as was initially planned. Be happy for it to come out next summer, instead. That’s when this thing will be “over” — not over as in, gone, but over as in, we’ll have enough information and maybe some kind of treatment and we should be over the hump. It’s hard out there for authors with books out, so try to help out, if you’re able, by checking out their books. Amazon has been wildly inconsistent with book shipping, but that’s okay, because a whole lotta indies have pivoted to shipping — our local, Doylestown Books, will deliver, FYI.

Perspective helps. I try to remember that every generation has its own abnormal fuckery with which to deal. Spanish Flu, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, 9/11, whatever. And I’d rather be having this situation now than 100 years ago, or 50, or even 20. The internet has caused a lot of our problems but it’s also keeping us all connected when we physically can’t be connected. So, perspective helps, but it’s also important, I think, to realize that this shit could’ve been a whole lot better. We’re at a literal perfect storm of shenanigans — we’ve elected a uniquely malignant tumor, it’s an election year, we’re hyper-polarized, science has been under attack, Russia wants us mired in chaos, unfettered and unregulated capitalism is rampant, the social safety net has been chewed up by the squirrels of greed, our Democratic candidates are arguably targets for the very disease we need to fight. And so on, and so forth. So, yes, we’ve dealt with worse, but this also could be going a whole lot better. We need to protect our election and get rid of Trump in November, full fucking stop.

Our kid is back to school, but distance learning. It’s hard, but things like Facetime helps. He’s in touch with his teacher, and the school is in touch with us. It’s abnormal, but has enough of the normal with it that it softens the sharp edges of the current moment. We try to play it like we’re each in separate submarines, or space ships. You can communicate with others in their other vessels, but you dare not step out, lest you be sucked into the void of space, or swallowed by the sea.

A tweet from Jodie Whitaker as Doctor Who this morning made me cry. I don’t know that it would normally have done that? But these are strange times, and I wept like a smacked baby. (Here’s the tweet, btw. You too may sob uncontrollably for a moment!)

Strongbad did not make me cry this morning, but rather, laugh. That tweet, here. Also, I think I got a letter from Strongbad? We bought the Trogdor game, and then next day, got a handwritten letter addressed to me from… Strongbad. Written as Strongbad. With some extra Trogdor cards? Life is weird, but can still be amazing.

Games help, too. Like Animal Crossing, which I talked about here. But board games, too. We learned Azul the other night, and that was great. Bought a bunch of games, actually: Wingspan, Trogdor, Seven Wonders, King of Tokyo, Tsuro, ummm. That might be it? Learned X-Wing, but needed something that was for more than just two players. Also been playing Magic: the Gathering — the kid, who is only eight, has been playing now for two years, and last game he kicked the asses of me and my wife. (Note, we’ve not learned most of these games yet, but I find that YouTube — that hive of scum and villainy — has been helpful explaining how to play in ways that rulebooks generally don’t.)

My wife sometimes asks if we’ll be okay. And that’s such a hard question to answer. I mean, individually, will we be okay? I can’t know that, but I couldn’t know that before everything went down with The Cove, The Rona, the Trumptown Pox. No individual is okay forever. Is civilization going to be okay? Probably. It’ll hopefully change. This whole thing has exposed how vital it is to prioritize the social safety net — how a strong social defense of health and family defends our national and global interests by proxy. Disarray and disorder and greed at the governmental and corporate level leave us all exposed in huge ways, and it’s easy to think, “Oh that just fucks over individual people,” but once it fucks over a wide array of individuals, now it’s affecting groups, and society at large. So hopefully this thing shines a big hideous light on our ugly failings and the black light shows just where we’ve splattered the ceiling with our grotesque ejecta. Or something. Meaning, it shows us what to fix, and how to fix it. But does that mean “we’ll be okay?” In the long run we’ll be okay, but the short term? Oof. No idea. I like to imagine it’ll be turbulence on a plane. Worst turbulence. The kind that hurts people, tossing them out of their chair like popped popcorn. But the wings will stay on the plane and we’ll find clear skies. For now, though: expect a lot of fucking bumps. So, at the risk of sounding like some ranting Twitterati grifter, buckle up.

Facebook is bad. But, it’s been a nice place for steadier check-ins. My FB is a walled garden — it’s largely people I’ve met. I don’t use it much for sharing links, or anything. Just check-ins. It helps. People talking about what it’s like in their corner of the world, wherever that may be.

Food is good. JFC, you see how utterly broken my brain is? THIS IS BAD. THIS IS GOOD. THiS HeLPs. Anyway. Seriously, I always loved cooking and this has been a little more of a challenge now in terms of what’s available and what’s not, but it’s lead to an increased creativity in what I’m making. Kid made cookies the other day too, so that was nice. I subscribed to a local meat and fruit/veggie CSA, so I’ll have that going for me. We’re not in full DEPRESSION-ERA cooking, yet. But I did buy a fuckload of Spam. Which honestly just replaces the fuckload of Spam I already had.

I am mountain man. Do I try to trim my hair and beard or just let that shit go HOG FUCKIN WILD? Maybe I shave the head, grow the beard. Or shave the beard into a weird configuration. Some kind of SINISTER RUNE. Gonna have to figure out what to do with my skull fur.

Oh! Did I mention I’m writing this from the new writing shed? A post on that soon. It’s spare right now, very echo-ey. Just a desk, a computer, chair. Photo here. I’ll get couch, bookshelf, St. Andrew’s cross, aviary, occult reagents all set up and then update everyone.

Anyway here are some more photos. (More at Flickr.) Talk to y’all soon.