HEY WHAT’S UP, FRANDOS. Figured I’d pop in and say hi, talk about what’s going on here in this part of the Word Mines. Down in the dark. With the writhing things and the gently humming stones. 

First up, I’ve got two stories in the Nightfire audio horror anthology Come Join Us By The Fire. Nightfire is a new horror imprint under Tor, and the anthology features some truly astonishing storytellers like Paul Tremblay, Brooke Bolander, Carmen Maria Machado, Richard Kadrey, the mighty Joe Lansdale, and more. Double bonus? It’s free as hell. You can check out the individual audio stories here. Hope you dig ’em.

Also, ICYMI, Lifehacker shouted out my… apple reviews? Yep.

Star Wars dot com shouts out some great SW characters who began in books or comics — and it lists both Rae Sloane and Mister Bones.

And did you know Wanderers was a Locus bestseller for the month of Oct 2019? Landed at number two on the list, which is, well, it’s damn exciting is what it is.

(And as always I remind you: if you read Wanderers and dug it, please leave a review at your favorite REVIEW HUT. Meaning, Amazon or Goodreads or other social media outlets.)

I have other news to share like the [REDACTED] book that’s in the works or the three [REDACTED] or the film and TV news where [REDACTED] but such is the life of the author. Much remains seeeeecret. Until it’s not.

Also been updating Flickr with new photos — I’ll pop a few up at the blog on Monday, but for now, you can catch a taste there.

And that’s it.

See you on the far side of the weekend.

Life brings a steady stream of news, good and ill, and so today I bring you a fistful of each — which to open first? I suppose a spoonful of sugar, and all that.

Wait, do I have a spoonful in the fistful? I think I’m mixing metaphors. WHATEVER.

The good news: this weekend I’ll be at both the Morristown Book Festival and the Bucks County Book Fest. At Morristown tomorrow, I’m doing a Star Wars panel with Jason Fry at 12 noon, and then I and Rob Hart will be chatting about Wanderers and The Warehouse respectively, and that is at 3PM. (Full Morristown schedule here.) We’ll be signing after, I believe? I assume? Yeah. And at Bucks, I’m appearing on Sunday, at a 3pm sci-fi panel with Josiah Bancroft and Mike Slater. Signing after.

The bad news is —

Hey, remember how I was going to the Surrey Writer’s Conference outside of Vancouver at the end of the month? Given everything with my mother’s passing and the move, it became just too untenable, and there’s too much going on, so I woefully had to back out. I know! I know. It’s such a great festival and I was going to hang with pals like Delilah Dawson and Eric Smith, but it unfortunately it’s just *gestures chaotically* right now. (Extra bummer for me, I was heading up there to check out the UBC Heirloom Apple festival so that’s a small gut punch to miss it.) This also ruins my curious pattern of going to Canada every dang October. I HAVE BROKEN THE PROPHECY AND NOW I DO NOT KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

So, if you were heading there to see me — well, I won’t be there. But again, to boomerang back some good news, it is an absolutely amazing conference which you surely already know and so the lack of me won’t impact your experience at all — you’ll get so much out of it by the end you’ll wonder why you even cared about me at all.

(Answer: my luxurious, well-unguented beard. That’s why.)

Anyway, updates will at some point get more regular here as grief and chaos abate.

I’m also nesting on some cool news like a patient hen, and at some point these eggs will hatch.

Onward, we go.

Bringing together his acclaimed novella The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky and an all-new short novel My Heart Struck Sorrow, John Hornor Jacobs turns his fertile imagination to the evil that breeds within the human soul.

A brilliant mix of the psychological and supernatural, blending the acute insight of Roberto Bolaño and the eerie imagination of H. P. Lovecraft, The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky examines life in a South American dictatorship. Centered on the journal of a poet-in-exile and his failed attempts at translating a maddening text, it is told by a young woman trying to come to grips with a country that nearly devoured itself.

In My Heart Struck Sorrow, a librarian discovers a recording from the Deep South―which may be the musical stylings of the Devil himself.

Breathtaking and haunting, A Lush and Seething Hell is a terrifying and exhilarating journey into the darkness, an odyssey into the deepest reaches of ourselves that compels us to confront secrets best left hidden.

Readers Will Follow You Wherever You Want to Go

I don’t give a lot of writing advice, mostly because I still feel very much when writing like a man fumbling around in a darkened house with a shitty flashlight trying to find the exit. Everyone writes in different ways, and a big part of every novel (or project) is figuring out what your process is for that particular work. That being said, I think one of the most important aspects of writing that isn’t talked about enough is auctorial voice.

There are writers with a voice so strong and individual, it conveys upon their fiction an air of certainty. Veracity. Physically, I have a big voice, and when I used to bellow at the park at my kids who might be running rampant, my wife would call that timbre “the voice of Moses.” You kind have to have that, as an author. I don’t really buy the “start with action” writing advice that goes around, but you do have to start with something. Voice. An interesting premise. A challenging statement. A riddle of character. An observation of human nature told in a way only you can say it. A description of something in an arresting style. In the first paragraph of By Gaslight by Stephen Price, the author describes a protagonist’s eyes as dark “as a twist of a man’s intestines” and with that phrase alone he reassures the reader that he is in command and to rest easy, he will guide you through the story with a firm hand.

Having done that, you can play. You can go where you want to go. In both of the stories in A Lush and Seething Hell, at a certain point I cease trying to tell linear stories and begin a technique I think of as prose cascades where I throw loosely related imagery and phrasing at the reader to discompose and indicate the mental states of the protagonists. It shouldn’t work, but if the reviews are to be taken seriously, it does. It’s like a free form atonal solo in a rock song – it shouldn’t work, but it can (though it may not always as with prose). Only because you’ve established the key, rhythm, structure of the song to start is the audience willing to follow you to this prog rock indulgence.

I learned (and maybe I should’ve known this five, six books ago) that readers want to follow you wherever you want to take them. But you have to lay the groundwork first, prove yourself a good guide, and once you do… it’s improvisation time!

*air guitar shredding*

I’m A Good Sieve of History

I’m sure a lot of authors are this way, but I’ve found over the course of ten books that I have an uncommon, though not unique, ability to read a lot of non-fiction books on a subject, sift through them and pull the appropriate details for verisimilitude. I am the sieve through which all the research passes and what we’re left with is a rich if limited array of detail in perspective that works toward the greater whole. I am a literary kidney, a liver. I am a grandiloquent oyster clutching a pearl.

I’ve also learned that I’m inspired by historical non-fiction books and enjoy the process of bringing the important bits to the page. This might sound grandiose and self-congratulatory; I don’t intend it to be. Just something that really came into focus when writing these stories.

Nothing happens alone, though. In writing My Heart Struck Sorrow, about a man loosely based on the very real historical figure and writer Alan Lomax, I reached out to Todd Harvey, head of the Alan Lomax Collection at the Library of Congress and he was very helpful to me, providing references and “deep cuts” as it were and details about Lomax’s – both John and Alan’s – journeys that I probably would not have found otherwise.

If there’s any lesson I learned here it’s this: experts on subjects are experts for a reason. It’s because they’re passionate about their field of expertise. And passion always wants to be shared. Reach out to people more knowledgeable than you. You’ll be surprised at how excited they get regarding your interest.

Sensitivity Readers Aren’t Just Necessary, They Make Our Books Stronger

I write quite a bit of historical fiction and if there was anything I regret about my first novel, Southern Gods, it’s that instead of trying to simply depict the nature of race relations in 1950s American south realistically, I wish I had found a way to make more of a statement about it. In both of the short novels contained in A Lush and Seething Hell, I try to make some statements about a few things – American imperialism, national identity, the fallacy of white male “genius” artists, race relations in the pre-WWII south and how that’s mirrored in our current era, socialism. The list goes on and on.

Because I try and deal with these thorny issues in a more direct manner – I’m shooting higher, I guess, with a greater chance of failure: I don’t want to moralize but I did want to shine a light on some less remarked upon things while still telling a good story – both my publisher and I felt it would be good to have sensitivity readers. For The Sea Dreams It Is The Sky (which took a lot of inspiration and direction from Pinochet’s regime in Chile) it was important to have South American readers who could help with verisimilitude (of course) but also make sure that I was not being exploitative of real people and their very real traumatic history. One of the sensitivity readers suggested that instead of having the story take place in Chile (as it had in an early draft) that possibly I should tap into a long and venerated South American tradition of creating a new fictitious South American country where I would not be as rigorously bound to dates and history and cultural detail. This was a welcome suggestion, and as a writer who had written a secondary world fantasy, these were muscles I could flex easily enough. It allowed me to obey the spirit if not letter of the law, as it were.

But I found, once Chile was replaced with Magera, that the novella became richer, lusher (if I may be spared for that indulgence) and began to take on an almost mythic quality which then informed the writing and the tone of the work. In all ways, that one suggestion made the story stronger.

For My Heart Struck Sorrow, my sensitivity readers helped navigate the waters of race relations in the deep American South of the 30s. I was nervous about this, especially crafting a realistic depiction of the cadences of language and colloquialisms without having my characters fall into stereotypical African American dialects. It was needle I had to thread carefully and I’m comfortable, happy even, with the balances struck there. I could not have achieved that, I think, without Kwame Mbalia’s generous and detailed notes.

Side note: Writing the Other: A Practical Approach by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward was a very good starting point and helped me immensely.

Writing Shorter Works that Inter-Relate Was Rewarding

I just came off writing three fantasy novels that, in essence, were one big, gigantic, ginormous story. I started a very ambitious Big Haunted Southern Historical Novel (that’s how I’m thinking of it, capitalization implied) and I was about 60k words into BHSHN when I realized it was going to take me years to write and because I’m always afraid I’ll be forgotten if no one sees or hears from me for five minutes (one of the by-blows of being a child left alone for long tracts of time) I decided I would write a novella. I had been reading a lot of Tor.com’s novellas by Victor LaValle, Stephen Graham Jones, Cass Khaw, and Jeffrey Ford and was quite enamored of the form (and those authors! Check ‘em out!). So I set out to write my own novella, and do it quickly.

I wrote The Sea Dreams It Is The Sky in around twenty-five days. It is 39,700 words, just three hundred words beneath the cutoff for novella mark. I had to struggle to fit everything I wanted to say in that space. In the course of writing it, it was as though my mind was pregnant with the story and I just needed to get it out as quickly as possible. Writing that way allowed me to tap into parts of my creative brain that maybe I wouldn’t have access to with a more deliberate and measured style. You can be the judge of if I was successful.

After we sold The Sea Dreams, and I was on the hook to write another novella, I wrote it slower though still pretty fast for me, and it allowed me to find and tether these two stories together in myriad ways that might not be obvious at first glance. They’re written to interlock and possibly I’ll write a separate blog to expound upon all the ways the two stories fit together. That story ended up being technically novel length, ending up around 65,000 words. None of that matters except when it comes to awards requirements. Both stories feel about the same in length.

But I learned that I really enjoyed writing shorter works and in doing so, I gain a sort of internal velocity writing them. I’m going to eventually return to writing longer books – BHSHN is still waiting in the wings – but it might be fun to crank out a couple of 60 to 70k word books. I don’t know. Everything is up in the air right now.

I Now Understand Why Stephen King Wrote So Many Books About Writers

Time was, my big pet peeve was when writers wrote about writers. I thought writers as protagonists were, as a choice of character, very indulgent and unimaginative. I no longer feel that way. Why?

Because I’ve done it. And that makes it okay.

Kidding.

After writing six books in first person from characters of wisdom if not raw intelligence, I was eager to write something more literate. I had been reading quite a bit of Bolaño and his characters inhabit academia, they are students and professors, and are familiar with myth, and classic literature, and Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian, Kristevan psychology and related symbology. They have expansive vocabularies and quip in second languages. They are rich in language.

I wanted to write something like that, where I’d be unfettered by character education. So I chose poets and academics, folklorists and ethnomusicologist and librarians. Smart people, in essence, with firm commands of language. And that made it exciting and fun for me write.

I’ve been a published writer for nine years now – a professional, as it were. And in that time I’ve learned that deep inside every reader is a writer. So, creating characters that are also writers is simply a good choice for the audience. Readers can see themselves in writers as protagonists. I just didn’t get that for the longest time. I was wrong but now I understand.

See? People can change their opinions.

* * *

John Hornor Jacobs’ first novel, Southern Gods, was shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel. His young adult series, The Incarcerado Trilogy comprised of The Twelve-Fingered Boy, The Shibboleth, and The Conformity, was described by Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing as “amazing” and received a starred Booklist review. His Fisk & Shoe fantasy series composed of The Incorruptibles, Foreign Devils, and Infernal Machines has thrice been shortlisted for the David Gemmell Award and was described by Patrick Rothfuss like so: “One part ancient Rome, two parts wild west, one part Faust. A pinch of Tolkien, of Lovecraft, of Dante. This is strange alchemy, a recipe I’ve never seen before. I wish more books were as fresh and brave as this.” His fiction has appeared in Playboy Magazine, Cemetery Dance, Apex Magazine. Follow him on Twitter at @johnhornor.

John Hornor Jacobs: Website | Twitter

A Lush And Seething Hell: Print | eBook

My mother, Christine Wendig, passed away a week ago today. And though I usually rankle at that phrase — “passed away” — it feels somewhat appropriate here. I note that sometimes death feels like watching someone drift farther and farther from shore, with you standing on the land, and them on the water, and ahead of them, a bank of fog. You know that at some point, they’ll float far enough away that they’ll enter the fogbank and be gone, but until that time comes, you keep talking to them, keep trying to make them laugh, keep giving them ways to be comfortable out on that raft of theirs. But every day they move closer to the fog, sometimes by a few inches, sometimes by a few feet. It was like that with Mom, watching her go. She was diagnosed with small cell stage 4 lung cancer on September 11th (another reason to hate that day), and died three, four weeks later. The disease swept in quick and the decline was fast, but enough where we still had time to visit with her and let her know we loved her, and with her letting us know we were loved in return. We thought this past Sunday would be the day, so a lot of people came by one last time to say their goodbyes — but, to our surprise, she held on. And when she passed on Monday, she did so with my sister and I present in the room, and nobody else. She drifted into the fog, and was gone, as peacefully as could be expected.

It’s hard.

I expect it will continue to be hard.

I keep wanting to call her and talk to her about it, which is as absurd an instinct as there is — “Hi, Mom, can you offer me advice for when my mother dies?” — but it is what it is, I guess. As if life was not complicated enough, we bought a new house in the hopes of being closer to her, and then in spectacular irony, she was diagnosed a couple weeks later. We settled two weeks ago, moved in last Friday, and by Monday, she was gone. She never saw the new house.

It’s hard, it’s hard, it’s so damn hard.

The grief is strange — it comes at unexpected times. A thing triggers the memory and you don’t expect it and next thing you know, you’re tearing up and feel like someone punched you in the middle. I wanted to call her the other day to ask how to clean something — just a stupid question, but I couldn’t, and the loss of that simple exchange gutted me for a moment, just ripped my middle out.

Her obituary is here, if that’s the sort of thing you care to read.

But I also think that obituaries are limited — there’s a format and not a lot of wiggle room.

So, a few more things about my mother that an obituary could not so easily contain:

When she was younger, her and my father were self-described “hellraisers.” They talked about racing motorcycles and jumping a ravine in a snowmobile. My mother used to shoot pennies out of the air like Annie Oakley. She more or less retired her hellraiser ways as she got older, though my father did not, as much. (It took him a lot longer to mellow out.)

She first put fantasy books into my hand — Narnia, then The Hobbit. She didn’t like that sort of thing, to be clear — but she thought I would, even young, and so that’s what she read to me early on. (We did not make it too far into the Narnia books, just two or three deep.) She was a reader and her love of reading passed along to me. (She often read those kind of thrillery type of books. If a book had the name ‘Robert Ludlum’ on it, she’d read it.) She was supportive of me being a writer (though first I wanted to be a cartoonist and she supported that, too, even going so far as getting me a copyright for my comic strip) all throughout my career, from snout to tail.

(She did love Star Wars, though.)

She liked to cook, but not so much to bake. One of my favorite things she made was apricot-glazed chicken. She would make that for me whenever I came home from college. Baking, she could do, and do well, but though she liked having recipes, she also seemed to handle the chaos of cooking better than the orderly operation of baking. (True for me, too.) My love of cooking comes from here. She was a fairly brave eater, too, with the exception of sushi. When it came time to talk about what things of hers we wanted, her recipes was chief among them for me. Precious recipes, kept on endless notecards. I’ll scan them, too, to have them, but the artifacts themselves are all their own.

She loved pierogies. If the menu had pierogies, she ordered the pierogies.

She was incredibly particular about the cleanliness of her home and the arrangement of things. My friends and I would play a game growing up where we would find a knick-knack on a shelf (for example: one of our many wooden ducks), and move it just so. Not even so dramatic as turning it all the way around, but maybe a 45 degree shift. Then we’d time how long it took her to notice. It was always alarmingly fast, as if she were a spider who noticed a vibration at the distant edges of her web.

One of her favorite phrases was, “Whatever, whatever.”

She went by “Chris” but apparently once went by “Tina.”

She had a love of small dogs. Her latest and last was an elder chihuahua named Mabel, who was a very poor example of a chihuahua in that she was quiet and friendly to nearly everyone and super chill, not yappy. Mabel was by our side when Mom passed. (My sister has her, now.)

She loved the Jersey Shore. Long Beach Island, in particular. In an act of Unrecommended Parenting That We Loved Anyway, she and her sister, my Aunt Mary, let my cousin and I drink wine coolers there. We were probably like, 12 years old — so, you know, don’t do that, obviously, but it was great and we loved it. (We never felt anything because wine coolers contain approximately four alcohol molecules in a bottle of wine-flavored soda.) It was at the shore that she bought me the first Chronicles of Prydain book, and also my first Garfield collection. I’d sit on the beach and read.

She became more progressive as the years went on, counter to how some get older and grow more conservative. Mostly she just seemed comfortable enough to let people live their lives however they wanted to, or had to, live them. She was disgusted by Trump, which, honestly, thank fucking god.

She was an accent sponge. Proximity to someone else’s accent had her picking it up in an hour or less. It never lasted, obviously — but she had no barrier against accents, they just, shoomp, became part of her for a little while, like a borrowed superpower.

When I went away to college, my mother and father separated — they loved each other, I think, but were ultimately too similar and knew exactly how to push one another’s buttons. A curious thing happened when I moved back after many years in NC — they got back together for a short time. And then we went on our first Mom-and-Dad family vacation since I was like, two years old (that early one, to Tampa, then Disneyworld). We went out to Colorado. It was a good trip. Strange to find that in my early 20s, but it happened, and it was nice. Not long after again they separated once more, and officially divorced — he wanted to move to Colorado, she didn’t. That was that.

She became a walking, talking menu of various diseases — Rheumatoid Arthritis, Osteoporosis, COPD, fatty liver disease, diverticulitis, probably a couple more that I’m forgetting. She almost died twice in the last decade — once when her liver tanked, and second when a bad cold almost wiped her out. The liver, she got back to relative normal by, of all things, drinking coffee. Amazing thing, coffee. An important thing we learned during this time was that, with the liver entanglement, she had to get off pretty much all her prescription drugs — and for many years, we wondered if mild dementia was setting in, because she’d occasionally seem loopy, or ask the same question multiple times. She got off the prescription drugs and clarity came rushing back. A weird blessing in disguise, that liver.

If you require a comparison to what I think she was like, especially as she got older, it’s Carrie Fisher, or General Leia — tough, but witty, and with an occasionally foul mouth. (One of the first times she met the woman who would one day be my wife she dropped the f-bomb, fuck yeah.) She was uncompromising but kind. Weary but still wonderful, especially in the presence of my son, to whom she became a great grandmother.

She wanted a humble end — a cremation, no funeral, no obituary, and we tried to oblige by her wishes, though obviously we felt the need to write an obit. She paid for everything ahead of time and got all her affairs in order: a kindness for us, a hardship for her. She settled on allowing us a small luncheon of family and friends.

She was a good Mom, and I’ll miss her every day.

I hope I was a good son to her.

Love you, Mom.

As noted in the obituary, in lieu of flowers or gifts, donations instead should go to Last Chance Ranch, a wonderful local shelter where my mother got Mabel. (Also where we got our two dogs, Loa and Snoobug.) You can donate here.

My mother on the day she got Mabel:

OH, HELLO THERE. I promised I’d be back on Monday with some photos, so you can see right there at the top, a big ol’ portrait of a beautiful mantis. She’s ready for her closeup. Also she’s ready to eat the head off your neck.

More mantis photos at the bottom of the post.

Let’s see. What’s up?

October 7th, Super Awesome Rad-as-Hell Authors Kevin Hearne and Delilah S. Dawson will be at the Doylestown Bookshop at 7pm, and who will be joining them? ABRAHAM LINCohh wait no that’s not right. *checks notes* It’s me! I’ll be there! All three of us! Shenanigans will ensue! You will buy The Princess Beard from them!

October 11-12th, I’ll be at the Morristown Book Festival in NJ — not sure of my schedule there but I think I have a couple panels and a signing? You should go!

October 13th, I’ll be at the Bucks County Book Festival, doing a SFF panel at 3pm. Signing after!

Wanderers has been doing… really well? Like, better than all my other books, easily, in terms of sales and reviews. (The SW books here are a bit of an outlier, of course.) But it’s hard not to be happy with the overall response. Every day I get tweets and emails commenting on how people really fell into the book and enjoyed it, and that’s honestly pretty dang heartwarming. It’s nice to see a book you wrote — especially one that’s huge, that’s been living in your head for years, that demanded you take a lot of risks — connecting with people. Because you just never know.

(And I remind you that if you read the book and dug it — or any book! — we authors appreciate the hell out of reviews on places like Goodreads and Amazon. If you hated the book, that’s okay too! You can shriek your bad reviews into the nearest tree stump and the mutated cookie elves who live there will definitely deliver them to me in a timely fashion.)

Of the book, Broad Street Review said:

“Wendig isn’t so much holding up a mirror to society as he is opening the window. The apocalypse is not set 20 minutes in the future, and the story is concerned not with its aftermath but with the fact of its occurrence.”

You can read an interview with me at the Amazon Book Blog.

Enterprise News said of the book (note, review contains spoilers):

“The world of Wanderers is as rich as it is fragile. It clocks in at 800 pages, but, reminiscent of the Harry Potter books, it goes fast and you won’t want it to end. One gets the uncomfortable sensation of looking into a mirror of our America, but with the frightening and the awful comes the astoundingly selfless and truly heartening reminder that, no matter how tough times get, there are always those who will stand up and be shepherds.”

Librarian Misha Stone appeared on King 5 News in Seattle to recommend it, along with some other stellar reads (like Annalee Newitz’s newest).

So, again, thanks to all who have recommended it to others and responded to it.

YAY YOU.

Now, more photos. (Or visit my Flickr.)

Have a great day, frandos.