Hey, I got a new camera! The T6i has worked very well for a good while now, and though I thought HEY MAYBE I’LL JUST DROP A HUGE CHUNK OF CHANGE ON LIKE, A 6D OR SOMETHING, I instead opted for an incremental upgrade. I skipped over the T7i and went to the 77D. Here’s a couple of doggo pics, to show off the camera’s cred:

Those were taken with a Canon 100-400mm zoom lens. That lens ain’t cheap, but it gets a loooooot of use. That, my macro, and my 50mm prime portrait lens.

And, if you want to see one of the last photos I took with the T6i —

Here, have some bluebirds!

HAVE THEM I SAID

Anyway. Yeah.

Onto some news-slathered news snibbets —

Oooh, feeling fancy. So, Del Rey has done up a particularly nice ARC/ARE (advanced reader edition) of Wanderers that are going out now — it has a slipcover on which are gathered a number of the blurbs the book has received. It’s pretty sexy, I’m not going to lie. Oh, also, some folks in the UK noted their pre-order of the book kinda vanished, or got canceled — panic not, folks. There will be a UK-specific version, and that’s the one that will need pre-ordering. Otherwise, if you haven’t preordered yet, feel free to nab: Print, eBook, Audio. All coming 7/2.

Oh, and for double-extra-fancy with fancy-foam: Behold, this Erin Morgenstern blurb:

The Honeyed Dead. So, with the Miriam Black series over, there was one more tale to be told — and that is the tale of Wren, set between books 5 and 6. It’s a slasher-killer psychic mayhem tale called “Interlude: Tanager” and you can grab it as part of Death & Honey, a collection of three novellas by me, Kevin Hearne, Delilah S. Dawson. Print, eBook, Audio.

And I think that’s it.

Have a wonderful week, FELLA HUMANS, HUMAN FELLAS.

The world is dying. 

The Sunset Lands are broken, torn apart by a war of ideology paid for with the lives of the peasants. Drought holds the east as famine ravages the farmlands. In the west, borders slam shut in the face of waves of refugees, dooming all of those trying to flee to slow starvation, or a future in forced labor camps. There is no salvation.

In the city of Lord’s Reach, Seraphina, a slave with unique talents, sets in motion a series of events that will change everything. In a fight for the soul of the nation, everyone is a player. But something ominous is calling people to Lord’s Reach and the very nature of magic itself is changing. Paths will converge, the battle for the Sunset Lands has shifted, and now humanity itself is at stake. 

First, you must break before you can become.

History is grimdark.

Usually, when I have a story idea gestating in my hindbrain, I end up going to the library and basically checking out every historical nonfiction book they have on shelves. Then, I start reading. I read until one triggers whatever I’ve got stewing. What ended up poking this particular bear was a book called Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. It opened up by talking about the Holodomor, an event that is absolutely tragic, horribly brutal, and almost unknown to the wider world.

The Holodomor took place between 1932-1933 in Ukraine. Essentially, Stalin passed a bunch of measures like poorly implemented collective farming, the imprisonment of kulaks (land owners), and the destruction of local traditions which uprooted families, which destroyed lifestyles, overworked land, and resulted in the starvation of millions of people. He also imposed these insane grain requisition quotas which left people with nothing – literally. Estimates vary between 3.3 to 7 million people died of starvation in the Holodomor.

I’ve spent the past year basically inhaling all the history I could about the Holodomor, and Stalin. I can’t even tell you how many books I’ve read on these topics. Thousands and thousands of pages, at least, in preparation to write this book. I can tell you, however, that while I am a dark fantasy author, any darkness I could have possibly thought of has already happened somewhere in history.

I hear people say that grimdark fantasy isn’t realistic. I learned, in writing Seraphina’s Lament, that our own history might be the most grimdark story ever told.

There aren’t many secondary-world fantasy books featuring communist government systems.

Once I started talking about Seraphina’s Lament with people, trying to get reviewers to read my book, I realized that there are almost no fantasy books set in secondary worlds with communist government systems. Kings, queens, and emperors seem to take center stage, and a bunch of government systems born from that. While I call my governmental system in Seraphina’s Lament “collectivism” it’s largely the same thing.

The world is a big place, and a large part of writing, at least for me, is to explore parts of it—both ideas and ways of life—that I may never actually experience. I’ll never get to live in Ukraine during the Holodomor, nor will I ever live in Russia when Stalin was the Premier, but learning about it, and twisting it so it fit into my own secondary world and story, was a really interesting, if sobering, experience, and broadened both the world I live in, and the world I created.

Interesting things happen when I take real world events, and set them in secondary worlds.

While my book may be based on historical events, it is set in a secondary world. While I was building my world, some interesting things developed that I just didn’t foresee when I was doing my research. For example, in Russia, collective farming plots were often given based on how large the family was that was living on it. Many Russians would consider farm workers and hired help as family. In this way, they’d get more land to farm. (This detail was taken from the book A People’s Tragedy, The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes)

So, I took that idea and sort of poked at it a bit and twisted it. In my world, collective farming evolved in the same way, but resulted in non-nuclear family units. Most collective farmers are part of polyamorous groups, numerous husbands and wives. This evolved as a way for people to band together, pool resources and protection, and work larger plots of land. Larger families, essentially, boosted the chance of survival. I don’t really go into too much detail on it in the book, but it’s touched on.

I was also very careful about some details. I have interludes sprinkled throughout the book that detail short snippets of life of the average citizen in this world, unattached to my core characters. These stories (all but one) are directly influenced by eyewitness accounts of the Holodomor that I read in my research. I changed them to fit my world, but I left them there as homage to those who experienced these tragic events, and really lived them. (These interludes were largely inspired by eyewitness accounts in the books Red Famine by Anne Applebaum and Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder)

In this way, building a secondary world based on real-world events was really interesting. It was a challenge to see how to alter which important bit of world building, what to add that is pure fantasy, and which parts of the book to keep as homage to all those who lost so much due to Stalin’s horrible policies.

I can’t outline to save my life.

I tried. I tried so hard, but I just can’t do it. I keep seeing people wax poetic about the glory of outlines, but for me they just make me feel confined, constrained, and tied down. My story freezes and my muse basically just flips me off and walks away. I’ve never been able to color inside the lines. I decided, in writing this book, that I need to stop paying attention to how other people write and just write the way that works best for me. Once I really got that in my head, the floodgates opened and this book just poured out. Sure, editing it was a lot of work, but it was worth it.

There is an incredible amount of vulnerability involved in sharing your art with people.

Once this book goes out into the world, it will stop being mine. It will be yours.

And that is absolutely terrifying, exciting, and intimidating. I’ve been a reviewer for ten years now, an editor for two, and you’d think between all of that I’d be ready for this step but I’m finding that nothing really prepares you for this. Here is what I’ve spent the past year pouring my soul into. Now it is yours.

* * *

Sarah has been a compulsive reader her whole life. At a young age, she found her reading niche in the fantastic genre of Speculative Fiction. She blames her active imagination for the hobbies that threaten to consume her life. She is a writer and editor, a semi-pro nature photographer, world traveler, three-time cancer survivor, and mom. In her ideal world, she’d do nothing but drink lots of tea and read from a never-ending pile of speculative fiction books.

Sarah Chorn: Website

Saraphina’s Lament: Amazon

OH HI, I didn’t see you there. How long have you been hiding in my shrubs? A week? That explains all the Chinese takeout containers scattered around — I just assumed the squirrels had figured out GrubHub. No, no, it’s okay, you don’t have to get up.

SOME NEWSY NEWS KNOW-HOW, COMIN’ AT YOU.

Oh no I’ve been approached by the KGB. Ahem. What I mean is, I’ll be a reader — alongside Keith DeCandido! — at the Fantastic Fiction at the KGB event on June 19th in NYC. It’ll be great! I’ll read stuff! You’ll sit and listen! I’ll sing and dance! I’ll whisper secrets! I’ll steal your dreams and sell them to a dream merchant so I can afford noise-canceling headphones! Come on by. Note: I updated the Where’s Wendig page. I should have news to share soon-ish about book tour stuff for Wanderers…

They weaponize their barf, you know. So, Vultures came out a couple weeks ago, and it looks like it improved upon the sales of the two books before it, which is nice, and thank you. Adventures in Poor Taste did a great review of the book, saying that it “sticks the landing” and that it is a “near-perfect conclusion,” so I’ll take that. Check out the review, but note, it contains some light spoilers.

Oops I felled down. After many many moons I feel like I’ve finally rounded the bend on The Book of Accidents, and I hope to be done it by middle of March. It’s been a rough, rough book — I’m happy with it, but it’s pretty weird, and also kinda epic despite being arguably very intimate, just a story about a small family going through some real shit. We’ll see. I expect some serious trimming, but who knows. At least it hasn’t yet approached Wanderers size. Eep.

Speaking of the Sleepwalkers… hey, PRH Del Rey has started to put together some very cool blurb cards that I’ll be posting over on The Social Medias across the next several months. They contain, for the most part, blurbs from amazing authors, authors I admire, and I’m the luckiest boy in Booktown right now. I have *does a quick count* sixteen of these awesome things to share, and I’ve shared two so far, which I’ve popped in here, below, in addition to the one I’ll be posting this week. A gentle cough cough reminder that you can pre-order the book now, in print, eBook, and audio.

And finally, I got your macro photos right here. I mean, it would be Macro Monday without at least one macro photo, and yes I recognize that a lot of the time I don’t post a goddamn macro photo every Monday despite the name shut up I hear you grousing from the shrubs. You wanna leave the shrubs? You want me to call the police? No? Then simmer down. Anyway! Here is some melty ice showing off spectacular morning colors, aaaaand a woodpecker. A downy woodpecker, to be specific. Look at his googly eyes! I mean they’re not actually googly eyes but they look like it?

E.K. Johnston is a stunning talent, a huge Star Wars nerd, and also really, really nice? Which is honestly too good, and I have long suspected she is some kind of robot sent here to make us all feel unworthy, but with this post, she reminds us that she, and we, are all human. 

* * *

On Thursday January 24, my boyfriend broke up with me. It was kind of a shock. He’d just been promoted at work and I was very proud of him. He never acted like my career was detrimental to his. But this promotion included a HUGE life-change, and he just didn’t see how we were going to make it work. I was devastated, to say the least. I cried. I begged. I was so upset that I almost phoned Emma so that I wouldn’t have to cry alone. And then I remembered two things: it was almost midnight and my boyfriend was fictional.

This might take some explaining.

One of the first things my doctor told me when we started to get into the nitty-gritty of mental health and depression was that your brain is like a forest. The more often you travel a path, from thought to result, the easier it gets. This is why intrusive thoughts and negatives are so damaging: they use napalm to clear the way instead of a machete, and they’re really hard to shake. If you wake up and read something bad, it becomes easy to hate waking up. But if you start each morning reading the text message where your nephew tells his mum he’s decided to be an author because he loves you, eventually you start to like waking up. You have to cut a new path, and keep walking it.

Your brain is like a forest. Dark and full of weird stuff growing on top of dead things you used to love.

Every part of my life got better when I started taking antidepressants. There was the first week where I was one The Wrong Pill and slept for 20 hours a day, but even THAT was better than where I’d been. Then my doctor put me on Prozac (“it’s what space mom would want”), and I settled in. It was like I didn’t realize how far into the cave I’d been. To Do Lists that used to take a week to do half of were suddenly finished by Monday afternoon. Evenings that used to end at 6pm while I stared at the wall until midnight suddenly had six hours in which to do things. I hung up art. I bought an Xbox (and a TV. And a table for the TV). I baked Christmas cookies. I didn’t write a book.

Your brain is like a forest. There are scary things there, but there are great things, too.

I did get a phenomenal amount of work done. I did copy edits and line edits and first pass pages, all of which were usually HIGHLY stressful, but this time were fine. My house looked like an adult human lived in it. I cleared out my stuff from storage and actually dealt with it instead of just shoving it into my own basement. Emma and I finished Mass Effect at the end of October, and I felt true fannish love for the first time in a while. Everything was glorious as NaNoWriMo dawned.

Your brain is like a forest. It’s dangerous to go alone.

The first time I did NaNo was in 2008, and I wrote 14 words. The second time, in 2009, I wrote The Story of Owen, which became my debut novel four years later. Now I was forging new paths in my brain and enjoying the ability to focus on multiple things at the same time without feeling guilty about any of it. And NaNo was where I’d started, so NaNo was where I went. The first week wasn’t so bad. I went to a pretty café in my pretty town and wrote 10,000 pretty awful words. But they were, you know, WORDS. Except then I couldn’t keep going. I was lost, and I had to start again. I went to the cottage, a place where between 2010 and 2018, I’d drafted approximately a million words. I asked my editor for a phone call, forgetting about American Thanksgiving, and we talked it out. But I still couldn’t START.

Your brain is like a forest. You’ve read enough of those stories to know how this goes.

I decided not to worry about it. I was going to enjoy Christmas and keep plugging along at all the other things I’d let slide over the years, and the book would come when it came. Or at least, that’s what I kept telling people. On the inside, I was panicking. Everyone always says bullshit like “Would Van Gogh have been a painter if he wasn’t so unstable?” and my answer was always “WHO CARES MAYBE HE WOULD HAVE LIVED”, but now, presented with my own creative slump, I was worried. My brain didn’t work the same way anymore, and even though literally everything else was better, I didn’t know how to write.

Your brain is like a forest. You find help under the strangest rocks.

I went to the game store and bought Dragon Age: Origins. (I also bought the rest of the series and all of Mass Effect. I am a completionist.) When I got home, I didn’t know what to do. Like, what if I was really bad at it? On Christmas Eve, I decided to make my character, just to see how that went. Four hours later, I was in love. I was really bad at it. But, oh, it was great. I had a couple of weeks away from home (read: my Xbox), and one glitch that necessitated re-starting the whole thing, but as January wound down, I was almost finished the game, and I having the time of my life. And then I made Alistair, my perfect, kind, noble boyfriend, the King of Fereldon, and he immediately took all the reasons I thought he made a good king, and broke up with me.

Your brain is like a forest. There are familiar paths in places where you forgot you used to look.

I did something then that I haven’t done in years: I wrote fanfic. I took the weekend off from playing and wallowed in my feelings, every sharp edge of them. I had made Alistair, for the purposes of the game. I had brought this on myself in every way. I could, it was repeatedly pointed out to me, go back and fix it. But I didn’t. I chose to live with my choices, and what they had brought about…but I also chose to keep writing the story. And the words came. They came while I was falling asleep, snippets of dialogue that I still remembered in the morning. They came while I was dozing on the sofa, blocking out scenes and remembering which threads I wanted to tease out the next time I was at my computer. It was like how it had been when my brain was full of fog all the time, when all I had was the rush of my next chapter. Only now my brain was clear, and my world still shone in full colour.

Your brain is like a forest. Sometimes you find the breadcrumbs that lead you back home.

I still have to write a book. Actually, I have to write more than one. But I remember how. I went all the way back to the beginning and dove into the world that has always welcomed me home, regardless of the fandom I’m currently writing. I have always been intense—anyone who has ever watched a movie trailer with me can tel you that—but now I can pick where I direct my intensity and sustain the feelings long enough to get something done. I lost nothing. I only stopped for a moment to catch my breath and sharpen my knife.

Your brain is like a forest. Keep cutting through until you make your path.

(Obviously this is my experience, but I hope you can find something in it that is helpful, if you need it. I realize that being Canadian makes going to the doctor a heck of a lot easier, but if you think you need help, please, please, please try to get it.)

* * *

EK Johnston is the New York Times Best Selling author of Star Wars: Ahsoka, and a wide variety of other critically acclaimed YA novels. Her latest book, The Afterward— a romantic epic fantasy about an apprentice knight and a not-quite-reformed thief trying to find each other again after their quest to save the world — is out on February 19, 2019.

EK Johnston: Website | Twitter

The Afterward: Print | eBook