Apple-Obsessed Author Fella
It’s me.
It’s Anthony Carboni.
It is, as he puts it, the best dang movie in the MCU.
(okay yes also Black Panther GotG Captain America: Winter Soldier Spider-Man Homecoming etc)
Coming this Thorsday —
Er, sorry, Thursday?
A 13-part series going through the movie, Thor: Ragnarok. Prestige format, which, uhh, means we chunk this sucker up into 10-minute increments and talk the hell out of those wonderful cinematic nubbins. You want this in your earholes, so —
Sign up for updates at:
The Man in the High Castle meets Pacific Rim in this action-packed alternate history novel from the award-winning author ofUnited States of Japan. Germany and Japan won WWII and control the U.S., and a young man has one dream: to become a mecha pilot.
Makoto Fujimoto grew up in California, but with a difference–his California is part of the United States of Japan. After Germany and Japan won WWII, the United States fell under their control. Growing up in this world, Mac plays portical games, haphazardly studies for the Imperial Exam, and dreams of becoming a mecha pilot. Only problem: Mac’s grades are terrible. His only hope is to pass the military exam and get into the prestigious mecha pilot training program at Berkeley Military Academy.
When his friend Hideki’s plan to game the test goes horribly wrong, Mac washes out of the military exam too. Perhaps he can achieve his dream by becoming a civilian pilot. But with tensions rising between Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany and rumors of collaborators and traitors abounding, Mac will have to stay alive long enough first…
United States of Japan was a standalone story with the character arcs of both main characters finished by the end. But I felt there was much more about the universe I wanted to explore and know about. Initially, I tried to write a direct sequel with the same characters. But I struggled because I didn’t feel there was more I could do with their story that hadn’t been covered in USJ. Rather than forcing a followup, I started a new standalone book in the vein of Iain M. Banks’s Culture books and the individual Final Fantasy games. The opportunity to start over was liberating because it freed me up to experiment, expand, and try out all sorts of new things in a way I couldn’t with the first book. Because a lot of the legwork of establishing the major background pieces was already in place, I could spend most of my time focusing on what I wanted, which was the mechas and the pilots behind them. There’s loose connections between USJ and Mecha, but it was in many ways a reset as it revolves around a new cast of characters in a different time period. Thematically too, the stories diverged. The first book was an exploration of the horrors of war and the dehumanizing effects of torture, spurred by stories of the tragedies of WWII I learned growing up; my family lived in Asia during WWII and shared many of their experiences with me. The second book concentrated on the mecha pilots preparing to fight against Nazis and is really about the theme of persistence and endurance through difficult times.
The initial draft of Mecha was over 150,000 words in length, which is almost twice the length of USJ. Every idea I had, I put down on paper. There were many scenes I knew didn’t work, but I still wanted to try them and see where the threads took me. There were environments the characters visited, landscapes that were eerily strange, especially near the demilitarized zone between Nazi America and the United States of Japan. Some of those elements were cut in my initial edit. A major scene was also removed during my edits with my wonderful Ace editor, Anne Sowards. In every case of deletion, they were cool set pieces, but didn’t move the story forward. At the same time, those experimental failures made their way into other aspects of the plot and I was able to recycle the concepts into smaller bits that helped enrich the lore for other parts of the journey. They also provided context for what worked and what didn’t, where I went too wild and what, in contrast, felt like a natural part of the USJ universe. The eventual word count would settle in at around 125K words, but some of the stranger ideas that got discarded were important, if invisible, pieces of the fabric that helped the overall tapestry of Mecha come together.
I love ambitious novels. But sometimes, a book can be too ambitious to its own detriment. What I liked about the concept of a new standalone book was that it helped me to address what I felt was one of the biggest regrets I had for the first book- I’d tried to squeeze in too many competing ideas. United States of Japan was in part a look back at the tragedies of WWII, a spiritual sequel to The Man in the High Castle, an attempt to tell the story of thought police inspired by my curiosity about 1984’s thought police, a tribute to some of my favorite Asian films and games, a desire to modernize and lyricize the I Ching sequences of TMITHC into poetic dreams, a dive into the mecha works I loved from my childhood, and an examination of American culture from an Asian perspective (+ 10 more themes). For Mecha Samurai Empire, I simplified to the point that it was just focused on the five cadets aspiring to be pilots and the struggles they face, in part reflecting my own personal journey as an artist and writer. Some of the themes from the first book naturally made their way back in, but with the tighter focus, I felt I was able to tackle many of those older themes in a more organic way. This choice also explains, in part, why writing Mecha was the most (relatively) pleasant and enjoyable writing process I’ve had.
I love books that get into the technical details as my background is in technical art and writing. There’s a ton of mecha games, books, and films already out there. But I wanted to inject more realism and get into the nitty gritty of the controls, the training the pilots would have to undergo, as well as the whole philosophy/history of the corps. That meant studying a lot about tank warfare and using tank crews as a general template for mecha crews. Mecha cockpits in MSE come with engineers, munitions, a navigator, and a communications officers, rather than the single driver mechas usually depicted in a lot of anime and games. I also drew a lot on my own experience working in the animation industry creating complex rigs and digital machinery to hopefully lend more authenticity to mecha piloting. I wanted to move away from the idea of a “chosen one” that happens in so many mecha projects. You know, where someone is just instinctually great, born to drive, learning things that take others years to master to save the world. No matter how many jet simulation games you’ve played or manuals you’ve studied, if you, as an inexperienced person, board a fighter jet and try to fly it, you will crash and burn. In Mecha Samurai Empire, Mac and his fellow pilots go through hell before they can even touch a bipedal mecha. They have to start on the quadrupeds first, then graduate to crab tanks, and so on. Thematically, the difficulty of piloting a mecha connects with the narrative and the challenges the pilots individually face. What I appreciated most was how this forced me to really understand the world on a deeper level. Simple questions like, where do spare parts on mecha engines actually come from, and what type of fabric are their uniforms made of, helped inform the story and give breadth to aspects that I otherwise never would have considered.
Having more eyes on a manuscript can be super helpful and getting input from my foreign publisher was incredible. Mecha Samurai Empire actually published first in Japan with Hayakawa. So I worked closely with my Hayakawa editor, Aya Tobo, and my translator, Naoya Nakahara, as the book was being written. This was a first for me (I usually publish a book and then it gets translated). I continually emailed them throughout the process about questions I had and ideas I wanted to bounce off them. I also had to keep in mind that the book would be split into two books (Bunko paperbacks) in Japan. This proved helpful in creating a structure that I knew would have to work, both as split books, and as a whole, so that the dramatic pace was held consistent throughout. Hayakawa’s staff gave lots of fantastic feedback, provided very useful insight, and made corrective suggestions that were crucial. Because so much of the book revolves around Asian influences, their input really helped take it to the next level in terms of authenticity. Of course, it did increase the complexity as I was dealing with editing from the US and Japan at the same time. Fortunately, I feel the end result was a more rounded book with tons of details for interested fans, but (hopefully) not so obscure as to alienate.
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Peter Tieryas is the author of Mecha Samurai Empire and United States of Japan, which won Japan’s top SF award, the Seiun. He’s written for Kotaku, S-F Magazine, Tor.com, and ZYZZYVA. He’s also been a technical writer for LucasArts, a VFX artist at Sony, and currently works in feature animation.
Mecha Samurai Empire: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N
Aaaand we now have a poster!
Check it out at the bottom.
Reminder: the film is coming this weekend to Fantastic Fest, and now has been announced at Telluride Horror Show, too. You can find some additional press about the movie at —
And on Twitter, you can check out Craig Engler talking a little bit about how he and Tom Vitale’s decision to try to turn this thing into a movie.
People who want a writing career, here’s a thing you should know:
You’re always driving very fast toward a very high cliff. Not toward the wall at the bottom, but rather, rocketing toward the edge at the top. The precipice.
What I mean is this:
You get published with your first book, right? And it’s great. It’s roses falling from the sky, it’s a bubbly Champagne feeling in your nose, it’s a lightness to your step — an airy, giddy, level of triumph. And then you realize you’re not traipsing joyfully around a meadow, but rather, chained to the wheel of a fire-belching, fat-tired, steel-cage Apocalypse Car, and you’re barreling at top fucking speed toward what looks like the edge of the world.
This is in terms of money, in terms of ideas, in terms of the continued energy given to your career — you’re eventually going to drive off that goddamn cliff. That one book that came out? Whee! What fun! You got paid for it, likely in thirds — and with the book out, you’ve seen what may very well be your last paycheck. Sure, royalties might one day be inbound, but those are no guarantee, in the same way we are not guaranteed more days to live. You have what you have, and what you have is this book, live or die, sink or swim, succeed or fail.
Ahh, but but but, you also have this career, and a career is not one book. It is many books. Three or five or ten or twenty, spaced over a few years, or a few decades, and keeping that career alive means — well, writing more books. It means getting more attention. It means knowing what book is next, but also what book is third in line, and maybe what book is fifth in line. It means knowing the industry, having ideas, being flexible. A career is peaks and valleys.
And a career is one cliff after the next.
And in knowing that you are — after every book, every contract, every deal — driving ineluctably toward the next cliff, you have to figure out how you’re not going to die. Meaning, you’ve gotta spend the time rocketing toward the cliff performing some kind of… cliff mitigation technique. Choose whatever metaphor you like: installing rocket boosters in the car, hastily constructing a ramp that you will deploy via mobile trebuchet, training a flock of Canadian geese that you will anchor to your car in order to fly your ass over the edge and to the next butte or plateau ahead — whatever image you prefer, go for it. The point is that, your career is constantly in danger of crashing off a cliff. Your money will stop. The energy will slow and fade. You will be lost in the jungle next to the flaming wreckage of your vehicle.
Now, the good news is, it’s never really the end — you can crash, you can burn, and you can still climb up the next mountain and do it again. You may have to. I think every writing career suffers this — few writers have not sailed over the edge, thinking, WELP, THIS IS THE END. Many of them climb back out. Just as many, maybe more, don’t. (Usually the ones that don’t are, woefully, the ones who just can’t or don’t wanna hack it anymore.)
The practical example for me is that, I have three books coming out over the next 2-ish years — the final Miriam Black book Vultures (January), my epic not-quite-horror not-quite-SF The Stand/Station Eleven/The Passage novel, Wanderers (July), and The Book of Accidents (2020, tba).
Ah, but — here’s the trick, I’ll get paid out for those in increments, on publication, so I’ll see some money then, but there are also large tracts of temporal real estate in which I have no books. Further, to line up new books for 2021 and beyond, I need to pitch and sell those books now-ish, but I also can’t contractually pitch and sell new books until my current slate is in the can, and potentially not until some of them start coming out. Part of this is a guessing game — will the books be so successful that a publisher will want more like them? Will they explode on impact, requiring me to rethink my approach? Am I best focusing on some smaller, stranger projects — non-fiction, comics, whatever — to fill the gaps? It’s harder too because I’m a full-time author, no longer fit for public life, so I gotta make this count. I really, really gotta build a ramp, and I really, really gotta get the right angle, so I don’t fling my car into the bedrock, the jungle, or the void.
(Psst, keep your day job long as you can, kids.)
None of this is bad. I… enjoy this process, if somewhat grimly and anxiously. I like strategizing my thinking as to what I can write, should write, what I think my career needs to do, and I note all of this not to complain, but more to emphasize that a writing career is not necessarily just WRITE BOOKS, PUBLISH BOOKS, RINSE, REPEAT. It’s like this fucked-up four-person chess-game, and you’re two of the players, and the other two are The Publishing Industry and The Audience, and the best outcome is not to win the game but for everyone to reach some sort of impossible stalemate where all share in the win. It requires a measure of prophetic gambling, of trying to imagine the things you want to write, trying to hope you’ll love a book you pitch when it’s time to write it in 9-18 months as much as when you pitched it, and it’s also about keeping loosey-goosey enough that you can pitch ten projects and love each and every one of those narrative freakbabies with equal enthusiasm.
I note this because few will tell you that this career is about cliffs, and not falling over them.
But it’s important to know, and so here we are.
Good luck.
p.s. get a good agent who helps you strategize this shit
*revs engine*
*loads up grappling hook*
*checks radar for geese*
* * *
THE RAPTOR & THE WREN: Miriam Black, Book 5
Miriam Black, in lockstep with death, continues on her quest to control her own fate! Having been desperate to rid herself of her psychic powers, Miriam now finds herself armed with the solution — a seemingly impossible one. But Miriam’s past is catching up to her, just as she’s trying to leave it behind. A copy-cat killer has caught the public’s attention. An old nemesis is back from the dead. And Louis, the ex she still loves, will commit an unforgivable act if she doesn’t change the future.
Miriam knows that only a great sacrifice is enough to counter fate. Can she save Louis, stop the killer, and survive?
Hunted and haunted, Miriam is coming to a crossroads, and nothing is going to stand in her way, not even the Trespasser.
Indiebound | Amazon | B&N
TA-DA, look, a macro photo. My obligation is fulfilled and now I jetpack away!
OKAY FINE, some quick bits —
First, I’ve no idea what kind of bug that is? Some kind of leafhopper treehopper thing. Speaking of which, holy shit are we inundated with lanternflies now — they’re an invasive asshole bug and we were eating pizza outside at a restaurant on Saturday night and they were criss-crossing the air above us. I went to kill one and a second one landed on me as I was trying to kill the first. They’re becoming as common as mosquitos. And they eat apple trees? Those motherfuckers.
Second, speaking of apples, #heirloomapplereview has begun once more on THE TWITTERS, so hie thee hence if you want to watch me review apples on Weird Apple Twitter. Start here for appley mirth. Will likely be ongoing through the end of October.
Third, look, SyFy did a bit of an article on YMBTK!
Fourth and finally, the first book of my Heartland trilogy, Under the Empyrean Sky, is $0.99 at Amazon, and the audio is only $1.99 — so check that out if you want something that has been described as Star Wars meets John Steinbeck.
AND THAT IS IT.
Happy Monday, hoomans.
So maybe you remember in the halcyon salad days of Summer 2017, one mister Sam Sykes and one mister, uhh, well, me, we got on The Twitters and we did an improvised horror story, kind of a riff on a slasher film, but in Twitter format. Shitposting, the kids call it!
(“Sam Sykes and Chuck Wendig Just Wrote Horror Movie Gold on Twitter.“)
(Or, read the whole thing starting here.)
Well, that went kinda viral.
And when a thing goes viral, it takes on a weird life of its own, meaning, we started fielding offers to make our Twitter thread into Something. Movies, YouTube series, cartoons — but at the end of the day, we had two guys, Craig Engler and Tom Vitale, say they had a vision for it, and it was a movie, and we said, HELL YEAH. Because, holy shit, a snarky slasher film from our tweets? Sign us up.
As with all things in film and television, we did not expect anything to happen. Because that’s how it goes, 99 times out of 100 — I’ve had many properties optioned. I have some optioned now I can’t even tell you about. Blackbirds at Starz got really, really far, until… it didn’t.
So, we expected this was just a fun thing, ha ha.
*clears throat*
The movie premieres next week at Fantastic Fest in Austin.
It’s directed by Brett Simmons.
Produced by Griff Furst and Tom. (And, uhh, Sam and I! We’re movie producers! This may in fact be the dumbest timeline, but we are working it to our advantage.)
The character of Sam is played by Fran Kranz.
The character of Chuck is played by Alyson Hannigan.
This is YMBTK.
