A new Cold War threatens the galaxy, in this fast-paced and wisecracking thriller of spies and subterfuge.

Simon Kovalic, top intelligence operative for the Commonwealth of Independent Systems, is on the frontline of the burgeoning Cold War with the aggressive Illyrican Empire. He barely escapes his latest mission with a broken arm, and vital intel which points to the Imperium cozying up to the Bayern Corporation: a planet-sized bank. There’s no time to waste, but with Kovalic out of action, his undercover team is handed over to his ex-wife, Lt Commander Natalie Taylor. When Kovalic’s boss is tipped off that the Imperium are ready and waiting, it’s up to the wounded spy to rescue his team and complete the mission before they’re all caught and executed.

Don’t get ahead of yourself

Writers, especially novelists, think big. Big ideas, big plots, big ambitions. Hell, we’re often trying to cobble together a whole universe using nothing but our brains as a sort of pan-galactic spackle.

I love big sprawling stories, but when thinking big, it’s easy to get carried away, sketching out the entire epic seven-volume series before even a single book has been sold. Publishing is a tough gig, and I’ve learned the hard way that no battle plan survives contact with reality. So as tempting as it is to just pick up where my last story left off, I’ve realized that I need to pace myself, and tell stories that stand on their own two legs.

While I don’t want to get into all the gory details, you might notice I’ve got two books set in the same universe but from different publishers. That’s no coincidence and if you catch me at the bar at Emerald City Comic-Con or Worldcon, I may weave the whole wacky and wondrous tale for you. But each book stands firmly on its own and I learned that approaching The Bayern Agenda not as a sequel, but as a self-contained story, definitely helped me make it the best book it could be.

Continuity is the worst

When you write the first book in a universe, the sky is the limit. You want this character to have a tragic backstory? Bam. Done. Wanna pull a whole planet right out of where the sun don’t shine? No problem. Sure, when you’re editing later, you might need to check that you didn’t say Dirk Strongjaw’s eyes were piercingly blue on page 12 and then liquid chocolate on page 237, but that’s why god invented the Find command.

But now you’ve got two books, and suddenly your creative freedom has bounds. Things are established. There is…continuity. And let me tell you, you’re lucky if you even remember you’ve already written a book, much less what was in it. So when you’re trying to recall if you’ve already used a certain name or previously described a solar system, well, you better have a copy of that first book at your fingertips to check. Because a good copy editor may catch these things, but there’s no guarantee. Honestly, nobody will ever be as invested as you are.

In writing another book in the same universe, it was fascinating to discover just how bad my memory is for the very people, places, and ideas that I myself had created. Me, who could once relate the name and backstory of any alien in the Mos Eisley cantina!

Huh. I guess that’s probably what’s using up all the room in my brain. Curse you, Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes.

Leveling up

Getting that first book out there isn’t easy, but it comes with a sense of accomplishment. You have set yourself this goal—this singular task that most people never achieve!—and you have put a stake in it, vampire-slayer style. But with a second book come the dreaded expectations. You’ve established a bar you must meet and, hopefully, vault over without face-planting.

I’m not going to pretend that my writing automatically leveled up after my first book came out. It was not as though a Greater Writing Spirit tapped me on the head with their wand and bestowed upon me enough XP to make me a Level 4 Wordsmith.

That said, it’s pretty hard to put a 100,000-word work out there in the world without learning something. When I first started trying to write novels, I’d invariably give up in frustration around 10,000 words. But having already summited Mount Deathcrag, it’s clear that there is a way to the top, and this time I know that all it takes to get past the slavering wyverns is tossing them some raw steaks and giving them a scratch under the chin.

Don’t make the same mistakes (make new ones)

You know what’s a little humiliating? When somebody—let’s say, totally hypothetically, the audiobook narrator of your first novel—points out that you made a basic math error at a critical juncture in the book. Turns out dividing and multiplying aren’t the same! Who knew? (Look, I have a degree in English, not in dividing, okay?)

Of course, that meant when my second book rolled around I checked my math much more carefully. (Which means that somebody will find a math error in 4…2…1…) But, by the law of “only so many spoons”, it also means that I probably screwed up somewhere else, my gaffe lying wait like so much unexploded ordnance.

But, by the same token, each subsequent book is an opportunity to improve your game, to right your wrongs. For example, one of the things I regretted about my first book was not featuring a more diverse cast of characters. This is a story set in the future, after all, and the future belongs to everybody. The importance of representation was not something I had given much conscious thought to ten years ago when I was drafting what would become my first book, but by the time it came out, it was hard not to see where I’d fallen short. I can’t change that book now, but I can aim to do better with each successive story I tell, starting with The Bayern Agenda.

Gimme a break

I’ve wanted to do nothing but tell stories since I was old enough to write down words. Actually getting a chance to do so? It comes with its fair share of pressure, from deadlines to reviews, but the worst of it comes from my own head: Do I really deserve to be here? Am I any good at this whatsoever?

It’s easy to let these insidious thoughts turn into self-doubt that stymies any sort of productive work. For me, the biggest mistake was trying to break through with brute force, dragging the words out one by one, like chiseling them from stone.

So, perhaps the most important lesson I learned from writing my second book was that it’s okay to take a break sometimes. Take a walk. Go to the gym. Play some video games. Anything, really, that’s not writing. Because sometimes when something on the page isn’t working it’s not a problem that your conscious mind can solve, and all staring at the screen is going to do is make you spiral further into feeling like you’re failing. Just like when you work out, sometimes you need to rest that big old brain muscle before you start exercising it again. It’s all part of the process.

* * *

Dan Moren is the author of the sci-fi espionage thrillers The Bayern Agenda and The Caledonian Gambit. By day, he works as a freelance writer, hosts technology podcasts Clockwise and The Rebound, and talks pop culture on The Incomparable podcast network. By night, he fights crime while dressed as a bat. He could use some sleep.

Dan Moren: Website | Twitter

The Bayern Agenda: Amazon | iBooks | Indiebound

Here, then, is a cardinal truth in creative industries (and there are very few cardinal truths in creative industries): you are going to be rejected. A lot. A lot a lot. A lottalottalot. It’s just a fucking thing. It’s water, to fish — you’re going to have to swim in it. It’s like being a baseball player and not wanting to get hit by a fly ball now and again. It’s like being a chef and thinking you’re not going to fillet your hands and fingers from time to time. It’s like being Indiana Jones and thinking there won’t be Nazis all over you like bees. (Nazis: I hate these guys.)

You’re

going

to

get

rejected.

By agents, editors, reviewers, award-givers, readers, and, I dunno, birds? Probably birds.

But rejection, like the existence of birds, is an external phenomenon.

It comes from *hastily gestures* OUT THERE.

It should not come from *thuds chest with fist* IN HERE.

What I mean is, let others reject you.

Do not self-reject.

Now, it is of course vital to right up front recognize that there is a serious difference between a proper sense of distant self-criticism and straight-up self-rejection. It will be absolutely necessary for you to judge your own work and to test its mettle, again and again. But it’s critical to do that with a clear eye, and note the word I used above: distant. You gotta gain some yardage, even mileage, away from the thing to really see it for what it is. You can’t just read a thing you just wrote, make a big trumpeting FART NOISE and then flush that thing down the creative porcelain. There exists a keen difference between judging the work on its merits, and prejudging it based on… well, we’ll get to what it’s based on. And if you cannot see the forest for the trees in terms of identifying the distance between self-rejection and self-criticism, between judging and pre-judging, just assume it’s the worst kind and you shouldn’t do it. Get clarity another way.

Let us say this up front:

Writers are the worst judges of their own work.

Especially, particularly as you write it. What I mean is, in the day to day my own feelings about the writing I just did or am currently doing vacillates like a drunken yak. It pinballs between THIS IS THE BEST THING I’VE EVER WRITTEN to OH GOD WHO EVER LET ME BE A WRITER to MEH JUST MEH FUCK IT MEH MEH ENNH PPBTT GRR. Even after I’ve written a thing, I have moments where I think, okay, with some edits, this thing is really going to work, and then the next day I’ll decide, oh god it’s horrible I should just burn it in a barrel and go be a longshoreman, whatever the fuck a longshoreman is, see I don’t even know what that means, I can’t be a writer, words are meaningless to me.

(Like, is it the shore that’s long? The man? What does the man do on the shore?)

(Whatever.)

In there lurks the slime-slick boogeyperson that is: self-rejection.

Self-rejection, as noted, is you pre-judging the work as lacking in some critical way, and so you take action to sabotage it or cease it entirely.

But it is a beast with many faces.

The most obvious of the bunch is, you say, FUCK THIS SHIT, and you either stop writing the thing you’re writing, or you take the thing you wrote and chuck it in a trunk before immediately burying it in your backyard. You pre-judge the work. You find it wanting. You quit. Problem there is, of course the work is inferior. Of course it fails to match the vision in your head. The perfect will always be the enemy of the good, and the first draft of a thing is never the final draft.

So, don’t do that.

That is self-rejection. And huzzah, we solved it! *begins to load up the parade float*

Wait, what’s that? More insidious versions exist? Well, shit.

Let us identify those insidious faces of self-rejection, shall we?

“I’m not even going to start.” Self-rejection can hit before you even begin. You wanna do a thing. You’re excited about the thing. And then that voice gets in you — it’s the Momo Challenge, man, that horrible stretched-out goblin face jumping in the middle of your shit and telling you not to even start.

“I have decided that my work is not good enough for the big leagues, so I will instead aim only for the minor leagues.” What this means is, you come out of the gate and decide the work isn’t good enough for the Big Agent or the Big Publisher, and instead you aim for a small publisher or to publish it yourself instead. Now, before you get salty, there exists perfectly excellent reasons to self-publish or publish with a small publisher. (Note, however, some small publishers are ill-equipped to handle the realities of Actual Publishing and may inadvertently or purposefully fuck over you and your book. Do your due diligence.) But some also treat those like secondary or tertiary markets, and they move the bullseye closer so they can more easily hit it. They refuse to test its mettle and give the work its day in the sun, preferring instead the shelter of obscured shadow.

“I will neg my own work.” As I noted a few weeks ago, one of the skills authors gotta manifest is the ability to tell the story about your story — meaning, how to talk about your work. But one of the tricksier faces of self-rejection is when you talk about your work but you hamstring it with a lot of negative flimflammery. You bleed out your confidence and say, “Well, I dunno if it’s any good,” or, “It’s not as good as so-and-so,” or, “You probably won’t like it.” Don’t fucking do that. Don’t do it. You worked hard. You don’t have to present the thing like it’s the greatest thing since tacos, but be confident. Be excited! Don’t poison your thing with that kind of negativity.

“Hey, my aspirations aren’t that important.” A combination of the two prior is this — underselling your aspirations. You want to be a professional author? Then try to be one. Own it. Don’t shortsell it as a hobby, don’t claim you’re not a ‘real’ writer, don’t handwave away your goals and desires in the face of mounting pressure.

“I’ll change who I am and what I write to suit somebody else’s idea.” One version of self-rejection is putting our creative fate in the hands of someone else. We let their vision become our vision because we don’t trust our vision enough. You’re going to find a whole lot of people who have the wrong idea for you and your career. They mean well. But they’re still fucking wrong. Don’t walk their path. That’s theirs. Their path is fraught. The ground is loose. There are wasps. Fuck that path. You gotta make your own way. Have that clear vision for yourself, and none can take it from you.

“The work isn’t ready yet so I’ll just do these 400 other things first.” Procrastination is a snake masquerading as a tool. You’re like, “Oh hey I need this screwdriver OH GOD IT’S A PIT VIPER IT’S BITING MY EYE.” We do this thing, and I’ve done this thing, where we pre-judge our work to be unready, and so we choose to do more work on it — a bunch of worldbuilding, one more draft, another draft, a 453rd draft, a rewrite, a new outline, maybe I’ll start this other book first and then come back to this one (spoiler warning, I won’t come back to it). This is one of the nastiest versions of self-rejection because it doesn’t feel like self-rejection. It feels like progress! It feels like work! “I’m working! I’m doing stuff! I’m a writer!” And yet, somehow, the work never seems to actually get done. You kill it under a smothering blanket of love and it dies ten feet from the finish line.

Those are just some of the manifestations of self-rejection.

So, what do you do about it?

Well.

Uhh.

*taps pen against desk*

Don’t do it?

Okay, okay, it’s not that easy.

First things first, just be aware of it. Be aware it’s a thing. Scrutinize your motivations for giving up on a project, guard yourself for ways you’re underselling it or sabotaging it. Yes, it’s okay to decide a project isn’t right for the world. I wrote a lot of bad novels before I ever wrote any good ones. But I also learned not to give up on them, either. That sounds like the same thing, but it’s not. You can still write a thing, believe in it, and try your best to put it out there. And when it doesn’t make the cut, then you know. It’s the difference between letting rejection come to you naturally versus, say, just smothering the thing in its crib.

Second, turn off your brain when you write. Like, okay, not the part you need to write, you don’t wanna open the Word *.doc the next day and see SMUHHGH FUHHH TOLEDO TOILET BEANS JUNIPER NNNN777 65432 — some kind of inane, brainless version of Jack Torrence’s all work and no play repetition. I do mean that there is a part of your brain that is reserved for criticism. It’s the editor side. In there somewhere is a dour little prick with a tut-tut finger and a sour face. He’s an accountant. Fuck that part of your brain for now. It is Cask of Amontillado time. Get the bricks. Wall him up. Let him out later. He’ll be drunk on sherry, it’ll be fine.

Third, recognize that sometimes the voices of self-rejection are not your own. People in your life will fill your skull with bad advice and negativity. Sometimes they do this to be kind, trying to warn you away from a hard career or trying to deliver unto you their vision of success. But their intentions don’t matter; the result remains poisonous. And those voices in your head create long, loud echoes. They echo back and forth inside your braincave so often you start to take on their voice as your voice. Don’t adopt their negativity as your own. Don’t code bad advice — or worse, abuse — into your own narrative program. Get shut of it. Kick ’em out of your head.

And then finally, just care less. I’m wont to give this advice most often about writing, but you can actually care too much. Take some fucks out of your fuck basket. Not all of them! You need some fucks to give to the work. But too many fucks makes the basket too heavy to carry. Caring too much turns into a burden. Even autonomous actions like breathing and sleeping become difficult if you think too much about them.

That’s it. That’s self-rejection in a nutshell.

It’s a thing. Be aware of it. See it. Shut it up and out.

Go make stuff, unburdened by fear and sabotage. I’ll wait here.

* * *

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

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