In high school, I could barely run The Mile.

(I capitalize it because it was always exactly that — not a mile, but rather, The Mile, part of some wifty health assessment thing that chose to test how fast kids could run The Mile, usually while a gym teacher buzzed alongside you in a fucking golfcart.)

I had what was once called ‘growing pains,’ or ‘knobby knees,’ or more properly diagnosed, Osgood-Schlatter, which sounds maybe like some fancy chocolate or a Nazi that Indiana Jones punched. Basically, it pushes out part of your knee just below the cap, so you get this elbow-like protrusion there. It hurts. You can use it as a gym class excuse. So you bet your ass I used it as a gym class excuse. (I of course sat off to the side and read books. I know, it’s a little on-the-fucking-nose.) As a result, I generally did not have to complete The Dreaded Mile.

I added that word, Dreaded, because it was awful. All that slogging and running. Most kids looked like they were dying. Running laps around the soccer field. Wet and sweaty. Some kind of teenage death march. A YA novel waiting to happen: a teen version of Stephen King’s The Long Walk.

Eventually, the Osgood-Schlatter faded. The knobby-ish knees remained, but without pain (mostly). And I just chalked it up as: hey, running is stupid. Nobody should run. I biked here and there, that seemed nice, and I was able to tell myself: ha ha, people who run are dumb, at least a bicycle gets you somewhere. And I of course internalized all the supposed evidence that running was bad for you anyway, and that runners were chumps. Suck it, chumps. Destroy those knees, dipshits. Oh, oh, what’s that? Hamstring pull? Shin splints? Suckers.

I’LL NEVER BE ONE OF YOU, I trumpeted to the skies from my bicycle, which is to say, from my couch, while playing video games probably. NEVER SHALL I BE A RUNNER.

And then I had a kid.

* * *

Life, you’ll note, presents you with certain crisis points. I don’t necessarily mean crisis points like OH SHIT A DRAGON or OH FUCK THERE’S A GUNSHIP HELICOPTER CHASING ME or I CAN’T DECIDE IF I WANT TACOS TONIGHT OR PIZZA OH FUCKING SHIT THIS IS A REAL FUCKING CRISIS, DAVE. I just mean, life sometimes hip-checks you up to a cliff’s edge, where it forces you to either summon the wherewithal to jump or walk back from the precipice. Neither being a wrong decision, mind you — but one requires you to screw your courage to the sticking place, and the other has you err on the side of caution, and at times, cowardice.

Jump or walk.

Fuck or run.

Shit or get off the bucket.

Writing was like this for me, at various points.

I wanted to be a writer for a very long time. Junior high cemented it, and I never really let go of that dream, a dog with a favorite toy clamped in his teeth. But out of college you start taking on jobs that seem to get you further and further from the dream, right? And you get busy. And you don’t have as much time to write. And it’s like realizing, oops, you dropped the toy and now you’re sitting there, watching that beloved toy drift farther downstream. And if you don’t jump in and get wet, you may never get that toy back. I hit a point where it became, do I want to do this or not? How will I manage it? I had to start setting up some kind of plan. I didn’t need a fucking spreadsheet or checklist or anything, I just had to take it seriously enough to sequester for myself some time and space to write. Even nested in other jobs. I had to say, I’ll write in the morning before work, or I’ll write at lunch. Or I’ll secretly write at work, meaning I was kinda double-dipping I know I know you’re not supposed to do that shut up I did it anyway. I’d steal time and write a hundred words here and there. Not necessarily to write things To Sell, but simply to write — to practice, to get better, to figure it the fuck out. A little bit here, a little bit there. It added up. It led to a freelance career in gaming.

And the crisis point came again when I had taken on so much freelance work that I either had to stop taking on new freelance work or quit my day job. And another crisis point came when I had to decide to quit freelancing in order to write a proper goddamn novel. (I couldn’t do both, it turned out. I tried, many times, but I couldn’t split my focus and exercise what turned out to be two very different sets of creative muscles.) Each time I found a way to close my eyes, hold my nose, and jump.

I figured out how to figure it out.

A little bit at a time.

* * *

So.

As it happens with kids, they do their own kind of Pokemon evolution, where one day they’re potatoes who move like potatoes move, which is to say, not at all. And then they’re caterpillars. And then they’re the walking dead. And then they’re Usain Bolt, sprinting at top speed toward the sharp corner of that coffee table you didn’t babyproof, you asshole. NOBODY NEEDS GLASS-TOP COFFEE TABLES WHEN YOU HAVE CHILDREN. PUT THAT AWAY. IT’S ALSO VERY DATED, TO BE HONEST. YOU HAVE KIDS NOW, YOU NEED A COFFEE TABLE MADE OF SOFT EARTH AND BAGS OF BIG-SIZE MARSHMALLOWS.

Our child, the Childe B-Dub, started walking at eight months, and started running at eight-months-and-one-day, and it became immediately clear that he was evolving much faster than I’d have liked. (As I have noted in the past, every day with a kid is like that scene in Jurassic Park where the velociraptors learn to open doors.) It also became clear that before too long, he was going to easily get away from me. I envisioned the day when he decided he was going to bolt at top-speed toward a busy road, or a wood-chipper, or some kind of elk-fighting arena… and I wouldn’t be able to catch him. It wasn’t just his speed. It was his sustained effort. The kid must’ve eaten a bunch of 9-volt batteries because he was the Energizer Bunny. He could go and go and go and go. I could sprint for about *checks watch* six seconds, at which point I would have to concede his fate to the elk arena.

So: crisis point.

I either had to get in shape —

*shudder*

— or I had to expect my two-year-old was going to run into the woods and be gone forever.

I chose to try to catch him.

Which meant I had to learn how to run.

* * *

A few things, right out of the gate, you need to know:

Running is theoretically autonomous — we know how to do it from an early age, as evidenced by my child. But you should learn to run correctly, and sometimes learning to run correctly means first learning to run incorrectly — which is to say, figuring out why your shins hurt, or you have plantar fasciitis, or why running at this time is worse than running at that time, or why “these old hobo wingtips” do not make good running shoes.

The other thing is, you can go running, but you won’t necessarily be able to do it well, or for long, or in a way that doesn’t look like a sack of wrenches rolling cartoonishly down a hill.

This is especially true if you start this journey not in your teenage years, but rather, your late 30s.

So, I did something that seemed lazy at the time: I said, I’m going to start running, and I’m not going to set any expectations of distance, speed, or form. I’m going to run however far I can run without feeling like I’m dying, and that will be my finish line — and my ongoing benchmark. I will run that far as often as I can. And that’s it. I don’t need to be an expert. I don’t need to be a marathon runner who lubes his nipples so they don’t bleed through his shirt.

I just need to not die while chasing my Speed Force toddler.

See, we have a tendency sometimes to really, really want to push. We are trained that way across our various disciplines: push harder, push faster, push farther and further, PUSH LIKE YOU’RE POOPING, someone yells (okay, nobody really says that). We are invited and expected to go beyond our limits because that is how you extend those limits. And that’s true, to a point: but it also sets for us false expectations right from the word “go.” We believe however far we go isn’t far enough. We expect that there is, in fact, never ‘enough.’ We begin already by losing, by creating unreachable limits. And this is why, often in creative fields, so many people fail out of the gate — we have a vision in our heads of THE MASTERPIECE WE MUST IMMEDIATELY COMPLETE and so we endure a miserable regimen of work where it feels like some artistic version of Xeno’s Paradox: we can never truly cross the distance and be satisfied. Our goal, forever out of reach.

I didn’t want to do that with running.

I knew myself then, and know myself now.

I knew if I pushed too hard, too fast, I’d fucking hate it so bad I’d be done in a week.

So, I said, be gentle with myself. Be kind. Expect that I am going to be super shitty at this.

I said, I will do a little. Not a lot. Just a little.

And that first day, I ran… I think maybe a quarter-mile. It felt like dying. I’d heard tales of the runner’s high, but this was not that: this was a runner’s low, a sprinter’s nadir, a jogger’s lament in the deepest sweat-slick oubliette. And what I did there wasn’t even running, not really. It was a kind of gallumphing, a dead-armed horse-clop where my burning feet and numb-fucked legs somehow juggled my jiggling body forward until I had to stop.

It would’ve been really easy to feel bad about this. Not just about how bad it literally felt, but about how unsuccessful I was. A quarter-mile isn’t… actually that much. It’s like, 1,320 feet. Roughly a run down and back up our driveway. But I chose to accept that this was a good outcome. I’d never really run in a concerted way. This was a success. Honestly anything more than 50 feet was a success.

So, I set it: a quarter-mile benchmark.

And what happened next, happened pretty fast.

By the following week, I still set my quarter-mile benchmark, but I was no longer running a quarter-mile. I was running a half-mile, semi-reliably. And then, three-quarters of a mile. And maybe after a month, I dinged a level-up: I completed a motherfucking mile.

And still I didn’t change my benchmark. I told myself, I’m going to be happy if I get out there and fumble my way for a quarter-mile. If I do that, I can stop. Truth is, sometimes I still did that. Sometimes I still hit that quarter-mile and I was like, yeah, no, nope, it’s humid, my glasses are sweatily oozing down the bridge of my nose, my legs hurt, my taint is lava hot and I don’t recall my taint getting that hot before, and fuck this shit, fuck all this shit right now.

But that was not the norm.

The norm was, I hit my benchmark and said, I feel pretty okay, I’m gonna push a little more. I never said, “I’m going for the full monty, the big damn mile.” I just said, “I can do more.”

And I did more, until I couldn’t.

* * *

And that, as it turns out, ends up being a pretty good method for how I do things. Writing, running, and honestly, most everything: I set a low benchmark, an easy-and-not-too-low-limbo-pole under which I can shimmy, and then I end up doing more. Then I do more, until I can’t.

Here’s how that’s true in writing:

When I started, I’d tell myself I’d write a page. Just one little page. Often handwritten.

We had a notebook we passed around school, a big sort of mash-up fan-fic universe, and it was largely that, as a rule: you gotta try to write a page. You could, of course, write more, and inevitably, we did. And when it came time to freelance, and the metric was less about pages and more about word count, I set a low word count, too: 500 words, just crank out 500 fucking words and don’t die.

Of course, I’d end up writing more.

And as time went on, and I became more professional (“professional”), I was able to comfortably adjust the benchmark, letting it drift upward. The 500-word basement became 1000 words, and eventually, 2000. The same thing happened in running — my quarter-mile drifted up, a bit at a time, until now it’s comfortably a mile. I can run a mile every fucking time. I never don’t run a mile. And I say to myself, once I’ve run the mile? I am free to go. I am accountable to no one. I couldn’t run a mile ten years ago. Good job. High-five. Gold medal. Fuck off.

But I often run two.

Once in a while, I run three.

(I’ve never run more than three.)

(But I did do a three-mile run twice this past week. A first for me!)

In writing, I say I’m gonna write 2k, but sometimes, it’s 3k, and on rare days, I really bring it home with 5k or more. (I think 15k is my tops. It hurt my brainparts.)

Worth noting too that in each case, upgrading my benchmark sometimes came because I upped my game. In running, I was getting shin-splints and plantar pain, so I went to a running store and they told me about my gait and what shoes might work — I bought new running shoes, Hoka One Ones, and the pain disappeared. With the pain gone, I was able to run a little faster, a little longer. (Bonus: no pain.) In writing, I was able to cut out distractions with a program like Freedom, and I learned how to use Microsoft Word better, and simply how to hack my schedule and my diet in a way that gave me a little more energy and clarity. So: sometimes working more means working smarter.

But at the base level, it’s just about doing.

And if you want to do a lot, it sometimes means aiming only for a little.

The key was doing something that remains antithetical, I think, to our way of working: we are told to push and push and growl and grind. We’re told to break ourselves to get results. But that, for me, was simply not the way. Not to say I haven’t tried that. Or to say I haven’t sometimes pushed and pushed in a way that was painful — both in writing, and in running. But when I did so, it wasn’t because I demanded I do it. I was pushing past an already low bar of success. I already baked the Get-Shit-Done Cake, and everything after was sweet, delicious, Accomplishment Icing. And the extra fun is, when you set a lower benchmark and surpass it, it feels like a huge fucking win. And feeling like you won is a good way to motivate yourself to do it again, and again, and to do more next time.

It is a kindness to yourself. Don’t expect to run a mile out of the gate. Don’t demand you write the next bestseller. See the increments. Break it up. Find safe, sane, kind limits for yourself — and then you will find it increasingly easy to exceed them. To embrace a little and relish the success instead of always trying to conquer the whole damn lot — and falling short every damn time.

Deep breath. See the finish line. It’s right in front of you. Doing something small is better than doing nothing at all — because you’ve set your difficulty levels too damn high. Because your expectations are too steep, too severe. Because you could not find kindness for yourself and a small, satisfying measurement to keep you going, always going, always able to do more, go bigger, do better.

A game of inches is how you run a game of miles.

Now go.

* * *

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

I suppose we should just get the sad news out of the way now: I do believe the foxes are mostly gone. Rather, they’ve abandoned the den behind the shed — they may yet be nearby, in another den! I’ve seen a kit here and there, traipsing through the woods at twilight (for crepuscular beings, they be), and one leapt away from my shed the other day in a flash. My wife saw one of the parentfoxes in the woods, skulking about as foxy foxes are wont to do. But beyond that, there is no more presence of them here — no playful kits, no dug up bits, no dog toys stolen and played with. It may have been from our neighbors’ fireworks last weekend, or it may simply have been their time to widen their range and find another den. Alas.

I may do a calendar or a photobook soon, with some of that money going to animal/nature charities, because it’d be nice to find some way to direct these lovely photos I was able to take of the kits. Hopefully the foxes aren’t mad I’m stealing their intellectual property. If they are mad, they can take it up with me by hollowing out my meat and wearing my skin like a coat.

HA HA IT’S OKAY THAT HASN’T ALREADY HAPPENED

*barfs up rabbit bones*

Ahem.

But! Onto better news.

First up, Wired has chosen Wanderers as one of its fourteen must-read summer books.

And Michael Patrick Hicks did a really nice review of the book, saying: “Wanderers is necessary update to the canon of epic apocalyptic American spec-fic, examining the collapse of society and the mass extinction of humankind through the lens of USA 2019.” (Note, the review is lightly spoilerish.)

Also, I’ve got an additional date added to my Wanderers tour —

7/1, from 6:30-8PM, I’ll be at the Bethlehem Library for a pre-launch event! Books will be for sale through Let’s Play Books. (You can also pre-order and I’ll sign and they’ll ship.)

And again, here’s the other stores that will be sullied by my presence:

I’m also at BookCon next weekend — my schedule is:

Saturday 4:30 PM – 5:00 PM

Signing

PRH Booth #1221

Sunday 12:00 PM – 12:40 PM

BookCon Panel: How Our Present Impacts Today’s Science Fiction

Panel with Bob Proehl, Rob Hart, and Sarah Pinsker moderated by NPR’s Petra Mayer

Choice Stage

Sunday 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM

Geek Geek Revolution: BookCon Edition

Panel with Bob Proehl, and others

1E07

Sunday 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM

Signing

Autographing Area | Table #12

Aaaaaand don’t forget about me and Keith DeCandido reading at the KGB Bar Fantastic Fiction event on June 19th. And just after that, I’ll be at DFWCon giving a keynote, and eventually at SDCC, as well. Huzzah and hooray and bezoar.

You can also find me on a couple PODCASTS, which are for your EARS:

I was on Cordkillers! Whoa!

I also talked to Dan Blank on The Creative Shift!

And finally, Chuck & Anthony are back! Is back? Whatever. THE TWO OF US HAVE RETURNED, as the prophecy foretold. In the new cast, we talk the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, and we just recorded one talking about the finale, too. We’ll also be back to talk about more John Wick in the future, and maybe some OTHER COOL STUFF.

I think that’s it. There may be more, but whew, I’m spent. It’s Friday. It’s pants-off dance-off time.

I’d give you some final fox photos as a send-off, but Flickr is being a BITE IN THE ASS, so:

Look for them next week!

* * *

(Here I remind you that you can of course pre-order Wanderers at an independent bookmonger using Indiebound. You can pre-order the e-book, too —

Amazon! B&N! Apple Books! Kobo! Google Play!

And there’s always audio, via Audible.)

“Dear Penthouse Letters…”

Ahem. So. Endings are fucking hard.

They just are. It’s hard enough with one book, much less seven or eight books (or seasons of television, or movies, or what-have-you). The more epic the tale, the tougher it is to conclude that journey, because you’re not just concluding a “plotline,” you’re trying to tie dozens of threads — character, primarily — off in pleasing and appropriate knots. Some are tied together, others more grand than others, some get no knots or bows at all and are snipped cruelly with a pair of scissors. The larger the story, the more threads you have to deal with, and the goal is to have woven them into some kind of tapestry — not just a bundle of loose, untied threads that dangle in a waterfall of unfinished narrative. And Game of Thrones was a very large story, indeed. To its credit, it was both epic and intimate, beautiful and harrowing, twisty and entangling. I say with no small appreciation that the existence of this show is genuinely astonishing, and it is due credit to George R.R. Martin and the showrunners that it not only got to happen, but happened in a way that made it one of the biggest, most satisfying, and routinely most upsetting television show of the last decade, if not of all damn time. Big show. Big audience. Lotta meaty, chewy stuff.

It is therefore worth noting that no matter what Game of Thrones did last night, its ending would’ve been disappointing to someone. There is no way to satisfactorily end such an epic undertaking — especially such a morally and emotionally complicated undertaking — in a way that values every viewer and every fan. Everyone had their favorite characters, their pet theories, the questions they hoped would be answered. Who will be king, why did the White Walkers arrange things in a mysterious spiral, why did Bran just Warg off from the Battle of Winterfell in a bunch of fucking crows I mean was he trying to poop on something or just get some sweet sweet berries or what.

I’d like to say I’m still processing the episode, but really, I’m not. I was mostly bored by it — it contained a great deal of pontificating and mumbling and walking around, and not to a whole lot of effect. It had a few good moments, and one or two truly beautiful moments, and for me, as is my way, I like to unpack what I didn’t like in a sort of grander, storytelling way. Like, what does this mean for other storytellers and writers? Are there lessons to be learned? The answer to that is, only if you want, of course. Because as is my constant refrain: this shit ain’t math. What one person finds boring and unsatisfying, another will find invigorating and perfect in all that it concludes. So I do this for me more than I do it for you. You, of course, will come along for the ride as I try to figure it out, and maybe you’ll find something in here, too — to agree with, to think about, to stir your agita so badly that it causes you to make ten angry YouTube videos.

Once again, though, let’s do some spoiler space.

This time, a photo of an egg which also looks like the poster to the 40-Year-Old Virgin.

SPOILERS NOW INCOMING.

Awooga, awooga.

There were, of course, things I liked about this episode, and it’s wisest to begin with those. Dany emerging with the dragon’s wings framed behind her is perhaps one of the most gorgeous pieces of cinematography in the whole show. Jon Snow being a continued lump, good. Sansa as the Queen of the North is obvious. Jon got to pet the dog and live a life of quiet contemplation with his lover, Tormund. I am pro- all of these things. Yay these things. Huzzah and hooray.

But my overall feelings toward the episode were… well, as with the prior episode, I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed. I felt a kind of quizzical discomfort throughout, this slowly growing feeling that the time put into the show was not returning to me in any kind of narrative satisfaction. It was a treacly episode, like pudding sliding down a wall. And then the pudding reached the floor and then the episode was over and it was like, oh. Oh. Okay. That happened. That was a thing that occurred that I was passive witness to. All right. My wife was sitting next to me — she watched the first couple seasons until the brutality became too much, but she has sat with me on most of these last season episodes — and she was, “I only peripherally pay attention to this show, but even I’m somehow unsatisfied by this.” It lacked energy, for one (Bran’s mopey mystical delivery is perhaps a very good metaphor for how this episode felt), but for me it was more than that, one that I realized late last night, as various storms raged through our area, waking my ass up again and again —

The show didn’t feel like it ended.

The show felt like it stopped.

It’s like a premature death — one day your uncle is there, the next he’s gone, and there’s no saying goodbye, no real concluding paragraph to the end of his life. His obituary is just, “and then he got pancaked by a bus, the family is accepting charitable donations to Uncle Gordon’s favorite Possum Sanctuary, we respect your privacy in this difficult time.”

A good ending, as noted, ties up a lot of threads — character threads, ideally, but of course plot threads too — but an ending is also usually something that surprises us, and it does so in a way that while we are surprised, we aren’t shocked. In other words, it’s like a surprise party on or around our birthday — we didn’t know it was coming, but it’s also not completely bizarre. That’s how surprise parties work. It’s not a surprise birthday party four months after our birthday, because what the fuck is this, Dave, my birthday was four months ago, Dave, you tremendous piece-of-shit, maybe if you didn’t get high all the time on the couch we could pay attention to other people. Fucking Dave.

A bad ending fails to negotiate with or render those threads and surprises in a satisfying way. And I’d argue that’s what happened here, at least for me — and again, the way I look at this is mostly through the lens of characters, because let us repeat the motto: Characters Are Why We Care.

*rainbow star shoots across the sky*

Dany: She shows up, gives a kind of Fantasy Hitler speech in another language that somehow even Jon Snow and Tyrion understand, then smiles to Jon and is like, wow we’re gonna make the Kingdoms so cool, and he stabs her and she’s dead. And that’s it. That’s it for one of our main main characters. The curtain doesn’t close on her so much as it tries to close on her body, and comically keeps opening and closing on her cooling corpse as a dragon melts the Iron Throne in a heavy METAPHOR ALERT. (Turns out, Drogon is Old Valyrian for “on-the-nose.”) Most of Dany’s character beats in this episode are put in mouths of other characters. Men decide her fate in the margins of the show. She has no awareness, no reckoning. She’s there. And then she’s not. I do understand that this show sometimes gives us send-offs that are lacking in pomp and glory, but this felt like they were euthanizing her. It was her time, those gathered in hospice say as they casually up her morphine intake. It felt weak and particularly curious for a queen who had just last week been hella paranoid about Jon Snow — now she wants to hug it out and convince him it’s all cool, while they’re all alone, and he’s kitted out with sword, knife, and armor. Again: she’s there, and then she’s not. Dany just sorta stops. (Though only after the show retroactively villainizes her — there’s a lot of late-stage, “Well, even though we and the show treated her like a conquering hero, don’t we all really recognize now she was a batshit genocidal maniac? Good talk. Go stab her.”)

Arya: The show found its purpose for her in the Battle of Winterfell, and since then, has had no purpose for her. She doesn’t try to do anything in this episode. On the attendance sheet, she is merely marked ‘present,’ and then is gone. I like where she’s going (and if there’s not an ARYA GOES ON A MURDER VACATION spin-off I will eat my fucking television), but the show really has no idea what it wants from her anymore. She barely tries to convince Jon of anything. She’s somehow still in the city after… leaving the city. At the Electoral College meeting she’s content to just sit there, mostly. The show had a plot purpose for her and now that the purpose is over, it doesn’t know what to do with her on the chessboard, so it moves the Arya piece to the edges with an awkward shrug.

Brienne: Another character whose purpose has been met and is now mostly just there. She got her knighthood, she got her Lannister Love and subsequent heartbreak, and now she’s mostly just hanging around. She gets to tell Jaime’s story, of course, but not her own, because hashtag feminism. Her story, again, just… stops. It has no shape. It just gently runs into a wall and then has a nap.

Bran: Who the fuck is Bran. I mean, I know he’s the Three-Eyed Raven and is a theoretically half-immortal seer, but we haven’t had much sense of who he is — and now he’s king *nervous laughter* ha ha what the fuck. I guess? I guess. I dunno. No fault of the actor but Bran is one of those characters who clearly had a confused role in the show — you can tell, because at the Battle of Winterfell he’s mostly just there, like a painting on a wall or a bowl of scrambled eggs. He jumps to some crows for no good reason. He has some connection to the Night King which doesn’t matter and won’t be revealed. He’s just a Magical Wheelchair Boy who… is again, the king? Really? Him? Her? Egg? *extreme Thor voice* Is he though? Wh… why? His story doesn’t just stop — it arguably just begins. I do like the evolution of the power concentrating into the hands of nobles, and I like that in a roundabout sense, Dany did get what she wanted in that she broke the wheel — but she broke it so that Westeros gets Bran? Bran. Bran?! … Bran. Bran, like the thing that helps you poop. BRAN.

Sansa: Bran, though? Really? I know we’ve moved onto Sansa but that just makes me even madder that it’s Bran? Listen, Sansa gets probably the best ending here, in that she’s baller enough to be like, THE NORTH REMAINS FREE, YOU FUCKHEADS, and then she Nopes the hell out of the sheer wreckage of King’s Landing to rule her ICE KINGDOM. Just the same, in that line up of people sitting there, she shoulda been the Queen of Westeros. When Tyrion was like, “Stories matter and who has the best story?” and then it’s like, Arya is a faceless murder princess who killed the Night King, and Sansa has endured countless abuses and challenges to emerge as the smartest, coolest, most strategic player in all of the land, and then Tyrion is like, “It’s Bran! His claim to fame is that he fell out a window!” Hey, what? What the fuck, Tyrion? Sansa. It’s Sansa! It’s fucking Sansa, you dingle.

Tyrion: The smartest character, besides Sansa, is now the stupidest. He seems to recognize it. He gives Jon a kind of motivating speech, I guess, which theoretically urges Jon to kill Dany because Jon is just a lump of cold poop you can mold into whatever shape you want. I guess he ends where he should: as the power behind the throne. But he’s kinda been that at multiple stages, too — and here, we see a similar problem in him as we do with Sansa. There’s very little state change between them. Sansa is the unofficial queen of the north and is now of the official queen of the north. Tyrion is long a power behind powerful people, and he remains the power behind powerful people. He was the hand, he is the hand. There’s little interruption in that narrative line — again, little differentiation in shape. Stories capture contrasts and pivots — they are, when operating well, about challenging a status quo, not just in a world, but more importantly, for the stories of our characters. And there is no shift in the status quo for him. Or for a lot of these characters.

Jon Snow: I liked his ending. I think he’s a dong. And I like that the show seems to realize that, too. Good, go back to the north, you no-nothing, know-nothing hunk. Stabbing Dany was probably the most effectual thing he’s done in several seasons. Go pet your dog, dipshit.

And that’s that.

We conclude on a cool Regional Council meeting where they all joke about how they’re going to rule, not once acknowledging that the entire city is basically dead, you fucking pigs, and then the Starks get their time, mostly alone, not really together, with minimal emotional pay-off between the characters. The sisters don’t get a moment, really, not together. Bran is cryptic. Jon is haggard. Credits roll.

It just feels like this show didn’t really know how to have a shape to most of this — the Night King just stops. He’s there, then he’s dead, and there’s no more problem. Cersei and Jaime are there, and then they are killed by a thin layer of bricks. Dany gets got. Arya goes away. Sansa and Tyrion continue. Bran and Jon are the the only ones who seem to have some shape to their endings — a state shift, a break in their status quos. Jon’s as a reiterative return, Bran’s as something new. Whether they’re earned, I don’t know. But so much of what went on didn’t really matter. The White Walkers, the spiral, Jon’s heritage, various prophecies, Gendry, Cersei’s pregnancy, and on and on. They all seemed to be plotty things meant to motivate characters, but when their usefulness in that regard had faded, those plotty things were simply put back in the toybox. Once again contributing to the feeling that this was a show that did not end so much as it simply stopped.

A great disappointment for me is that the show has long been interested in the minutiae — and now it’s forgotten it. Were I writing the end to this season, and really, the end to the show, I believe I would’ve given each of our principal characters an entire episode for them to grapple with the enormity of what the fuck just happened. Give us their emotions. Give us time between them where they find peace, or horror, or truth, or comforting lies. Allow us time to see how Dany would rule (meaning, not well). Show us how Sansa rules. Show us Sansa and Arya being sisters again. Give us something. Anything. Some shape to the narrative. Some time to grieve. Some time to end.

But that’s what we storytellers do — we try to figure out how we’d make it our story. And this one isn’t mine. It was what it was, and I can only reckon with it in the ways I know how.

As with all things, Your Mileage May Vary. And it should vary! And it’s entirely awesome if you found this satisfying — that is of course why stories are interesting, not because of universal appeal but because we all bring different eyes and different hearts to them. We each see a different story, and so if you dug it, I high-five you. It didn’t work for me, though again, I recognize that the show has long been one I’ve grappled with in many ways. At the end of it all though, it remains a stunning achievement, worthy of its place in television history.

I just wish it ended on, for me, a more satisfying note.

* * *

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.

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