Hey? Psst. Psst. Have you pre-ordered Wanderers yet? If you have — or if you’re planning to! — you can get a cool bonus: it’s a Shepherd pin, designed to look like an Interstate sign. Signifies that you’re one of the shepherds, walking with the sleepwalker flock, ushering them to their mysterious destination.

Thanks to Del Rey and PRH for setting this up — getting the preorder bonus is easy, just go to this website at Penguin Random House, upload an image of your pre-order receipt, and that will set you up to receive your Shepherd pin. (Note, too, if you click that link you can get a fairy tiny preview of my new author photo. Oooooh. Because who doesn’t want to look at my BEARDO FACE? Gaze upon it! Learn its secrets! Submit to its writhing cilia!)

You can preorder in print, eBook, or audio. (More robust pre-order list available at above link.)

In less than four months, the sleepwalkers walk…

Listen, Eaters-of-Grilled-Cheese, put some fucking mayo on the outside of the bread before you pop it in the pan. Yes, instead of butter. Sure, you can still put butter in the pan if you really want. Yes, you heard me right. Mayo. Yes, that mayo, the mayo you know and love, not some different mayo. The mayo you think is gross. Yes, it’ll make your grilled cheese sandwich better. No, I have not lost my mind. I mean, maybe I have, but that’s more the fault of —

*gestures broadly*

— than anything related to food.

Okay, listen. Listen. Mayo isn’t some industrial food product. If you buy Duke’s mayonnaise (and you should), it contains the following ingredients:

Soybean oil, eggs, water, distilled and cider vinegar, salt, oleoresin paprika, natural flavors, calcium disodium EDTA.

That last one sounds weird, but it’s safe. Admittedly, “natural flavors” is a little vague, and could mean anything from “oregano” to “turns out, if you milk the sphincter of a corn-fed raccoon’s butthole, it produces a sphinctorial unguent that tastes a lot like butterscotch.” Hopefully in this case it’s more the former and less the latter.

The key thing here is that mayo is egg, fat, and acid.

When you bake, ever use an egg wash? Makes that baked good all nice and toasty-roasty brown, yeah? Same idea here. It evenly browns the outside of the grilled cheese while simultaneously lubing the pan (mayo is really just food lube, after all) and also giving you a little of that acid tang.

And by the way, also put some mustard on the grilled cheese.

Inside, not out. Mayo: outside. Mustard: inside.

It’s good. Just trust me. Dijon is good, honey mustard is fine, but honestly, so is straight-up YELLA MUSTARD. And while we’re here talking about mustard, that whole thing that In-N-Out does with cooking the patties in mustard? Yeah, that’s real tasty. Do that, too.

Let’s see, what are some other controversial food opinions I have?

You’ve seen The Sandwich. (Note: should be renamed to Chnurk Mandog to avoid any kind of cultural appropriation, my bad, oops, sorry. Not my intent!)

Cheesesteaks are the fake Philly sandwich — the real sandwich is roast pork and rabe.

Fish sauce goes in damn near everything. Sometimes Asian-style. Other times, Worcestershire. And yes, Worcestershire is fish sauce. Some people seem surprised by that? It’s umami, frandos.

“Clean” food is not a thing, that’s some Goop shit, don’t fall for it.

I do not believe a paleo or keto diet is necessarily healthy. If you like it, do it up, and I’m glad you found something that works for you. I do not believe science backs up most claims about such diets, unless you have specific conditions like epilepsy. Honestly, most diet trends are weird, and your best bet is simply the classic one: decrease calories, increase how much you move your body. But, YMMV.

I think being a vegetarian or vegan is great, both for flavor and for ethical betterment of our world. I also think a lot of vegetarians I know around these parts don’t eat enough actual fruits and vegetables, which is weird to say, but there you go. Regardless, I’ve cut meat consumption, though I won’t ever be able to cut it out entirely, because I’m a monster. (Though, I had the Impossible Burger, and holy shit. And that Just scrambled egg substitute was a capable imitation of scramby-eggs.)

We should be eating more bugs. Bugs are good, actually. To eat. Also for the world.

Pineapple pizza is fine. Relax.

And no, you probably can’t eat a pineapple the way that viral video wants you to.

Chicago deep dish pizza is delicious, also not pizza, but really just the baby of that time an inflatable mattress fucked a pan of lasagna. Still: delicious.

Kale is fine, but really needs the kale boiled out of it. Great in soup.

Don’t order steak at a restaurant. Nine times out of ten, you can do that at home.

You shouldn’t put butter on your pancakes / waffles / French toasts — and hold on, before you start yelling — because putting cold butter on the hot breakfast confection (which to be clear is really just cake) will cool it down unnecessarily. Also, you use too much syrup. I have a single fix for both of these, which is this: melt the butter you would normally use on your breakfast cake in a glass measuring cup, then add in some syrup. Real maple, if you have it. Warm that up, too, then whisk it together and serve over the breakfast cake. The fat carries flavor, which means it extends the sugar taste of the syrup like an extra warranty from Flavortown oh god I’m Guy Fieriing this I’m sorry. But still, the point stands: use a little more butter, melt it into the syrup, and you get butter flavor liquified on everything, and you can use less of the sugar stuff.

What else, what else.

Spam is good. Shut up, it is. Fried is best. And Spam musubi? Hnngh.

Your detestation of American Cheese is maybe misplaced. Yes, some of it is plasticky and creepy, but not all of it. Also it’s often the best thing to melt on a burger. I know, it’s “cheese product” and not cheese but you probably believe a buncha bullshit about this, like it’s got pieces of tire in it or antifreeze or something. Seriously, here is a very good unpacking of what American cheese actually is, and the things it is good for. And if you want an amazing melty American cheese, Cooper Cheese is your new favorite, trust me. Just don’t throw it at your cats or babies.

Your detestation of mayo might be misplaced, too. It’s fine not to like it, but to be repulsed by it — okay, sure, I blame the 1950s where American households wanted “fancy food” to go with newfound ideas of suburban wealth but didn’t know how to make it, so they just tried to fancify a bunch of stuff: “It’s Jell-O with bananas, hot dogs, and a sweetened mayo topping, all served out of crystal goblets.” But honestly, it’s good. It’s versatile. As I said, it makes for most excellent food lube. Also sometimes people make yucky faces when they see cake recipes that call for mayo, but seriously, it totally works, and helps make a very moist cake. (“Moist” is a word that has also gotten a bad wrap. DEFENDERS OF MOISTNESS, COME TOGeaaaaoh okay I see it, that is a little icky. But mayo in cake is not icky. Mayo on cake is probably nasty, though. So moist.)

Here then is maybe my most controversial food statement: a lot of the things you really hate are classist. And I’ve fallen into this trap, too, trust me, I’m no pure spirit. I’ve fallen prey to the organic hipster non-GMO thing too where it’s like, NO NO I AM AUTHENTIC AND ONLY EAT REAL [insert food product here]. Yes, some things on your grocery shelves contain a wealth of weird ingredients, half of which are corn. But many are also the products of really genius food science, and also are the things that, I dunno, low- or middle-class people can afford to eat. Sure, okay, fast food ain’t great, but consider the great many food deserts (not “desserts”) that exist across the country. Like what you like, absolutely. Dislike what you dislike, yes. Just try to recognize when your biases against “low-class” things also transfer over to people, and be aware how it looks to others when you shit on what are honestly common ingredients and foods. I’m sure I’ve said things in this very post that are privileged or classist, so again, I’m guilty as you are.

So endeth the lecture.

And so endeth my controversial food post.

I’ve probably offended *looks out over the crowd* all of you. And that’s okay! Food is personal. Food is home. And at the end of the day, we should like what we like and don’t like what we don’t like. Huzzah and hooray. Buy my books or I die. Moistly.

I have a Star Wars proposal, and it is this:

It is time to acknowledge that Poe Dameron is the unacknowledged love child of Han Solo and Lando Calrissian. Wait. *checks notes* Okay, that’s not it. *rifles through some papers* Is it that Lucasfilm should finally put an openly and obviously LGBT character on-screen and in a film soon? YES. Yes! Yes, but also, that’s not this post. Wait, so, what’s this post again?

*shuffles more papers*

AH HERE WE GO.

I propose that, after Episode IX, it’s time to separate out a Star Wars Cinematic Universe.

The SWCU.

You might be saying, “But wait, isn’t that already a thing?” And the answer is no, but also kinda yes?

The existing status of the Star Wars universe is this: pretty much everything is canon or canon-adjacent, meaning, it is existing across the spectrum of a singular Star Wars timeline. Everything is, for lack of a better term, connected along, and by, that timeline. The stories form a kind of narrative web, and every piece of the story is part of the tension of that web.

Here’s the problem, though: a web is a perfectly stable structure, as long as you don’t fuck with it. You can’t pull too hard or push too hard or create any dramatic movements, lest the web unthread and fray and fall to wisps of silk lost on the wind. And so it is somewhat with an increasingly large narrative web: you just can’t fuck with it too much, or you’ll tear the web. And that term I just used, increasingly large, is part of the problem: the web is getting bigger and bigger, because the Star Wars universe is growing across theoretically infinite borders. It’s films. It’s TV. It’s books, comics, games. Shit, it’s even a theme park, now. The Galaxy’s Edge theme expansion probably isn’t precisely canonical — but given that it’s getting a great deal of source material devoted to it, it’s at least canon-adjacent. And it seems to be “set” in a particular timeframe: the current-era sequel timeline, during the Resistance vs First Order struggle. It’s part of the material.

To go back to the question, isn’t the SWCU already a thing?

I answered the ‘no’ part.

But the ‘also yes’ part is important, too. The Star Wars Cinematic Universe does exist already, it’s just that nothing else really exists beside it. All are part of it. What I mean is, at present, the Star Wars universe is driven explicitly by the films. The films, understandably, set the course for the rest of it. In this great web, the films are less a part of the web and more the spider making it: I can speak from some experience writing the books and the comics that all the narrative work that goes into the Star Wars Universe is effectively happening in the wake of the films. They can’t get ahead of the movies. They can’t contradict the movies. They can’t deal with material that might one day be dealt with in film. They can only be additive to the cinematic experience, not really separate from it.

They do not stand alone.

They do not stand on their own.

To be clear, that’s sensible. The films are the driver of the universe and have been from the beginning. They were not adapted from pre-existing material. They were the pre-existing material.

Just the same, it presents problems. One problem is that ultimately, nearly all of the new material is essentially prequel material. It’s there to fill in gaps and details — essentially, an information-delivery-system nestled inside narrative. That’s not to say there’s no interesting stories to tell there, or that it’s impossible to craft a compelling narrative, but it does mean that very little is straight-up new, and not written to fit an existing pipeline. It means most of the stories are *record scratch* I BET YOU’RE WONDERING HOW I GOT HERE. That’s okay for a while! But as the universe continues to narratively expand, it ends up starting to feel like it’s just mining pre-existing material. Like any gold rush, you get that initial surge of cool new stuff, but it’s not long before you’re panning for meager flecks of shiny stuff and not great big nuggets of value. And to be clear, this is by no means a dig at my work or the work of any body telling stories inside Star Wars, it’s just a note that everything that happens in that space is happening in service to pre-existing material. Again: it’s all prequels.

Prequels represent a tricky conundrum because a story should have everything it needs to be understood in its first iteration. Right? From start to finish, the audience needs all the salient details to parse the plot and more importantly, the emotional throughline. So, to prequelize anything either means you’re going over redundant information or you’re leaving required material out of the prime narrative so that it can be told later. Neither are super-delicious choices. If you go over redundant information you run the risk of being bored, or actually changing the story (think of stepping on a narrative butterfly in the narrative past which then retroactively changes the future, like how Darth Vader’s redemption is very seriously complicated by Anakin’s choice to kill children and physically abuse the pregnant mother of his future Jedi-babbies). And if you’re leaving required information out, now you’re just doing the equivalent of offering paid DLC to complete a game someone paid full price to play in the belief it was, well, complete already. Which can be frustrating for the audience.

That’s not to say, again, there’s no room for this. Certainly there is! A character may not be fully-revealed on-screen, just by dint of a limited run time. A world may not be fully explored. Supplementary material can do this. But again, it’s important to see that phrase: supplementary material. Because that’s what it all ends up being. Very little standing on its own. Nearly all of it requiring service to a larger story property. (And it also falls prey to the “we need to explain every single detail, like gosh, where did Han Solo get those leather pants, and what is the epic origin story of the phrase, How Rude! —?)

One of the other problems is that a single timeline is essentially treated as a history — it’s why canon is a tough nut to crack, because canon treats stories less like stories and more like a history book. Everything becomes the fucking Silmarillion. Everything becomes binary — er, not the binary language of moisture vaporators, but rather, meaning things in the stories are either TRUE or they are FALSE, and realistically, in a connected canonical timeline, everything must be true, and nothing can disagree. Even though actual history books are full of disagreement (which is why historians are a thing). Because every single story informs every other single story — and the whole body of storytelling! — it means canon is a pair of goddamn zip-ties that gets tighter and tighter as more material is added, as you wriggle around.

Things don’t get looser and freer. They become more concretized, more calcified.

Think of it like that old Tron lightcycle video game — at first you have ultimate freedom but eventually, your lightcycle is building literal walls behind it that you will soon be trapped by. You do not have an infinite range of movement. One day: you gonna crash.

The more you establish about characters and worlds, the less you can continue to establish about characters and worlds. You’re filling in a finite number of boxes. It’s a crossword puzzle — all the things have to line up. Which, on the one hand, is an amazing achievement in narrative. But, on the other hand, is really, really difficult, and eventually maybe almost impossible.

As a sidenote on canon: it’s already kinda mostly broken. Stuff doesn’t line up nice and neat anyway, which is an understandable side-effect of a huge, connected universe. The end of Rogue One doesn’t actually line up neatly with A New Hope. The Solo movie tweaks the origin on stuff — like the dice — that is different elsewhere. Kylo’s scar moves. Stuff inside Battlefront II doesn’t agree with Aftermath.

Whatever. It’s cool. It’s part of the package.

Here is where I explain that my favorite metaphor to explain Star Wars:

Star Wars is the Millennium Falcon. It’s a hastily-cobbled together junk-boat that flies fast and is amazing and it’s full of heroes and we fucking love it for its flaws as much as not. This may sound like an insult, but I promise, it’s not: Star Wars is a glorious fucking mess. It probably shouldn’t work, but through the artfulness of the storytelling and the care of the designs and the passion brought to the stories, it doesn’t just work, it flies at lightspeed. Think, honestly, how much of Star Wars is junk in the story: from the Falcon to Mister Bones, from Jakku to the trash compactor, from Watto’s black market to the building of Threepio, it’s characters cobbling together stuff that shouldn’t work, but does. Just like Star Wars itsowndamnself.

“The garbage will do!”

And that’s a spirit I love about it. This brave, bold, gonzo mode of just smashing stuff together — it’s very much kid playing with dolls and action figures, writ large, and again, if you think I’m saying that as an insult, you seriously don’t know me. But what it does mean is that the brave, bold, gonzo stuff gets harder and harder to do in a deeply enmeshed, super-connected, singular-timeline universe.

So, to (ahem finally) get to the point of all this:

You gotta blow it all up.

It’s been sensible to keep it going through this sequel trilogy. You don’t want information competing with what’s out there. You don’t want Luke competing with Luke. (Though in writing the Aftermath trilogy I wish we’d been able to keep the Luke chapters! They were fun and wouldn’t have disagreed with anything, but I also get that they need to err on the side of caution.)

But, once Episode IX hits?

Blow it up.

Establish a SWCU, where the films and TV shows are explicitly their own thing. That, similar to the MCU: what happens in Marvel films do not necessarily impact what happens on the comic book pages, or in the novels, or in the games. They can! But they don’t have to. It’s loosier and dare I make a Captain Marvel pun, goosier.

(Captain Marvel was so flerkin’ good by the way. Also a good example of why it’s good to disentangle these stories — some of the decisions made there are explicitly different from what’s on comic book pages, and because it can play with conventions and expectations that way, it gets to tell its own story, not one married to something else. Yes, the way SW is doing it now is arguably “cleaner” — but “clean” is not an adjective I’d happily want to describe Star Wars. I like it messy!)

What does this allow you to do?

Well, for starters, you can —

(I know, I’m sorry)

Bring back Legends. While, yes, some Legends groups were, uhh, a little unpleasant to deal with at the release of Aftermath, I also recognize that there was an unholy host of stories that just kinda… end. So, do more. Finish that story. Or spin it out into more stuff.

It also lets you get back to Old Republic era stuff. Games, books, comics, whatever.

It also lets you go fucking wild. You can tell alt-universe Luke or Rey stories, or you can make up whole new eras that never have to be represented in film — they can be, but don’t have to be.

You wanna get real weird, play with some of the time-traveling features born in Rebels with some Spider-Verse thrown in. Different universes of Luke and Leia, different Rey and Kylo, whatever. So, splitting off into other universes can be literally reflected in the narrative. I mean, why the fuck not? A lot of Star Wars is narrative convenience. How long does lightspeed take? Some people want you to believe it has some kind of equation you can figure out — but trust me when I tell you, lightspeed takes as long as the story needs it to. Long enough to have the right conversation or discuss the right plan and then, zoop, you’re out.

(Well, actually, if you wanna get real real weird, you do the comic book universe reboot. You start alllllll over again. Which I suspect will happen, though I hope not for a couple decades. But it would give a change to adjust some of the prequel stuff which feels weird now, and maybe the Luke and Leia relationship, and you could sand down some of the rougher bits…)

(Anyway.)

We already have a little bit of this — the From a Certain Point-of-View anthology is, despite what some people think, non-canonical. Nothing there is “true” in the sense of the larger universe, and in fact, no one single story is true in relation to the other stories. They don’t connect. Each is a weird, wonderful little island. And who cares? Is the dianoga in that anthology the same as the dianoga in the movie? As much as I deeply appreciate the hyper-connected state of the SW universe, I also miss the unruly Wild West days where the stories were just stories — as isolated or as connected as they needed to be, understood to all be from their own certain point-of-view. Staying married to that approach runs the risk of the narrative becomes data-driven, where the spider web becomes chains more than flexible silk, where everything is forced to homage everything else. It’s not that it won’t work — it can, and will, because honestly, the SWU as-is exists as a property driven by people who are fans as much as they are capable creators. Just the same, I also look forward to them blowing it all up, and freeing the narrative to go wherever it wants, to whomever it must, however it can.

p.s. seriously though it’s time for LGBT representation on-screen, LFL

p.p.s hey did you know I write books, like this one…

* * *

WANDERERS: A Novel, out July 2nd, 2019.

A decadent rock star. A deeply religious radio host. A disgraced scientist. And a teenage girl who may be the world’s last hope. An astonishing tapestry of humanity that Harlan Coben calls “a suspenseful, twisty, satisfying, surprising, thought-provoking epic.”

A sleepwalking phenomenon awakens terror and violence in America. The real danger may not be the epidemic, but the fear of it. With society collapsing—and an ultraviolent militia threatening to exterminate them—the fate of the sleepwalkers and the shepherds who guide them depends on unraveling the mystery behind the epidemic. The terrifying secret will either tear the nation apart—or bring the survivors together to remake a shattered world.

Preorder: Print | eBook

It’s Friday. I got stuff to talk about, so let’s goddamn talk about it.  First things first?

Holy shit, I finished a novel. Er, another novel? I mean, I’ve finished a lot of these, to be a little self-congratulatory. In fact, this one will be my 24th novel, I believe. (I know! I know. I need an intervention.) In this case, it was The Book of Accidents, a kind of… intimate-but-then-epic family-besieged-by-horror story. And it ended up (coughs into hand) at 175,000 words, which is long? Probably too long. But it’s at least 100k shy of Wanderers, so, hey, there’s that. Is it good? I have no idea. Is it done? It sure as fuck is. PARTY TIME, PEOPLE. *rips off pants* *reads comic books*

Here is your membership to the Assassin’s Guild. Did you know that Chuck and Anthony are back castin’ some pods? We return with The Continental, a three-part narrative excavation of John Wick. And the first part — “Save the Cat, Kill the Dog” is live now at chuckandanthony.com. Come give a listen! Don’t forget to pay a gold doubloon first. Bonus: first episode also stars Mikey Neumann!

Roses are red, the Sleepwalkers are coming, along with their shepherds, and war-drums a-drumming. A couple new promo-scented blurb-cards for Wanderers are up:

Again, book comes out July 2nd — preorder print, eBook, or audio! Or add on Goodreads. OR TATTOO IT UPON YOUR FLESH. We have such sights to show you.

Onward, we travel. And soon I should be announcing bookstores I’ll be visiting for Wanderers — if you’ve got a bookstore you’d like me to visit, drop it into the comments. I can’t promise anything, as I can’t be everywhere nor am I the one who sets all this up necessarily, but it’ll help to know where people might like to see me instead of, say, throwing cans at my head.

AND THAT’S ALL SHE WROTE.

Happy Fuck It Friday, Frandos!