Chuck Wendig's Blog

HEY. You. Horror-writing-in-training!

Courtesy of Tananarive Due (the “Queen of Black Horror” and author of the truly vital The Reformatory) and Steven Barnes, I’m giving away two scholarships to Dark Dreams: Writing Horror That Kills.

(You can learn more about the course here: www.fearmasters.com)

This is a 3-hour intensive on how to craft haunting horror fiction. How to write horror that lets characters take the lead? What’s the plot framework look like? How the heck do they do it, and how do you do it?

(This class will be live both on Zoom and in person in Southern California.)

Way to be a potential winner —

Drop in the comments below.

Just tell me two things:

a) What’s your favorite horror novel from the last ten years?

b) What are you reading right now (doesn’t have to be horror!)?

Do this by Thursday, noon EST, and I’ll approve all comments and pick two random winners from the commenters to receive those scholarships.

Easy-peasy, blood-a-squeezy.

Just make sure that your account here is using an email address someone can use to reach you; otherwise, you won’t know that you won!

Get it? Got it? Rock on.

PSSSST. Psst! Hey. Hey kid. I hear you like *lowers voice* book events.

Reminder, then, that this week I’m —

At Midtown Scholar on Tuesday the 9th in support of The End of the World As We Know It, with Brian Keene, Somer Canon, and Rich Chizmar.

At Doylestown Bookshop on Wednesday the 10th in support of Delilah S. Dawson’s new rock-and-roll horror novella, House of Idyll — event starts at 6:30PM and Delilah is a true BFF so it’s gonna be a damn good time.

At Doylestown Bookshop again (okay I actually live in the vents there) on Saturday the 13th supporting another amazing rock-and-roll tale — ML Rio’s bad-ass book, Hot Wax.

(Remember too if you can’t make the events, the store can have books for you signed by the authors and then either picked up or mailed to you directly.)

Aaaaaaand, after this week —

10/1/25, I’m at Curious Iguana with Alma Katsu to talk her newest, Fiend. (Details here)

10/10/25, I’m at The End bookstore in Allentown, PA with Martha Wells to talk about her newest, Queen Demon. (Details here.)

10/14/25, I’m at Doylestown Bookshop with Philip Fracassi for Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre. (Details here)

11/7 — 11/9/25, I’m a guest again at Hal-Con in Halifax! Loved doing this and happy to do it again, and I get to see another BFF there, Kevin Hearne.

OKAY, YOU ARE NOW DULY REMINDED.

Go to all of these and collect a prize.

The prize is… uhhh, a ghost. I’ll give you a ghost. It’ll be great. A very nice ghost. Probably. It’s fine. Gonna be great.

OKAY LOVE YOU BYE

In February of this year, I started writing a new novel — this horror-fantasy tale, about a group of demon-blooded misfits plagued by dreams of a mysterious structure — called The Calamities, and it serves as the first part of a duology that completes with the second book, Chaos Reigns.

Lemme tell you, starting a novel in February 2025 was a wee smidge harder than I thought. It was difficult then (and honestly, now) not to be endlessly distracted with, well, *gestures erratically at everything everywhere all the time* and so it was a tougher row to hoe than I expected it to be. Writing some parts of this book felt like pulling teeth, and I was pretty sure everything I wrote was terrible? I mean, I was enjoying myself well enough? But it just felt like there was something between me and the book — something that was, I assume, a giant wall of interference called Reality. Still, I’d go back periodically and re-read parts of it and I liked what I read? So I have no idea how to measure it. To be fair, it’s probably gonna need a robust second draft process to kick the shit out of it — er, I mean, to kick it into shape. But that’s why Jesus invented editors!

It’s got a lot of violence and demony occulty business and sex and scads of diabolical worldbuilding. Still horror, but also fantasy — think about how a book like Library at Mount Char took the mode of urban fantasy but treated that mode like it was straight-up, raw horror. (If you’ve not read Library at Mount Char, then honestly, what are you doing with your life?)

Anyway! It’s fun. It’ll also appeal to those, I think, who like those… weird little WENDIGVERSE connections. (For example, if you recall the cat, Orange Lump, from Black River Orchard? You’ll find that cat in this book, as well! Perhaps even hanging out with his new owner from the end of Orchard.)

I thiiiink it comes out August 2026, but I’ll update you accordingly. So watch this space! Watch it! Never unpin your gaze! AFFIX YOUR STARE UPON ME

And holy shit today’s the day — The End Of The World As We Know It, aka The Stand Anthology, is loosed upon the world in a blood-dimmed tide. Huge honor to be allowed to play in that sandbox. Thanks to Misters Keene and Golden for letting me have my playtime there, and of course, to THE KING HIMSELF for blessing this book and allowing it to happen in the first place. (Thanks also to AP News for the nice review, which shouts out my story, “Grand Junction.”) You can pick up the book at Bookshop.org, if you’d like, or from any of the usual suspects, Amazon, B&N, etc. I also note that if you want a signed/personalized copy, order from Doylestown Bookshop and they can ship directly to you. (True of all of my books! Doylestown rules. As evidenced by the success of their now-annual Dark Ink horror event.)

Aaaaand let’s not forget there are signings for the book literally all over the world today, so hie thee hence to find one:

Note I’ll be at Vortex in Columbia, PA, with Alma Katsu, Brian Keene, Bryan Smith, Somer Canon, and Ron Malfi!

I’ve also got a buuuuunch more events coming up in the next couple months:

9/9/25

Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg, PA for End of the World as We Know It, with Brian Keene, Somer Canon, Richard Chizmar

(Details here)

9/10/25

Doylestown Bookshop with Delilah S Dawson for House of Idyll

(Details here)

9/13/25

Doylestown Bookshop with MJ Rio for Hot Wax

(Details here)

10/14/25

Doylestown Bookshop with Philip Fracassi for Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre

(Details here)

See you at one of these? Some of these? All of these?

Come say hi. Get books signed. We can be creepy together! OKAY BYE

Every day at recess, eleven-year-old Bevvy heads for the shade of her favorite tree—a safe space where she can avoid the other kids and escape into her fantasy books. When she finds a new girl sitting in her spot one afternoon, Bevvy wonders if she might finally have found a friend. But Cat is not exactly friendly. She even starts a fight with Bevvy’s worst enemy and then abandons her to face the consequences.

Later, Cat’s apology is cut short when a strange car rolls up. Cat tells Bevvy to run, drags her into the woods, and then opens a kind of doorway . . . in the air. Bevvy knows magic when she sees it, but this isn’t like one of her books. The world they escape to—teeming with strange creatures, spellcasters, and dragons—is shockingly real. It’s a world at war, with those who wield wild magic battling dark sorcerers.

Bevvy soon discovers that she has her own connection to the wild magic as both girls get caught up in the struggle. But Cat is keeping many secrets. With so much at stake, can Bevvy trust that Cat is truly a friend? And can she trust herself with her newfound power?

1. Your book may have a great origin story! Or it may not!

My last picture book (Luigi, the Spider Who Wanted to Be a Kitten) was inspired by a real-life experience in which I went to stay at a friend’s place in the country while I was between apartments and discovered that a giant spider was also staying at my friend’s place in the country. I’ve always been terrified of spiders, and while I’m better about them than I used to be, I am still not thrilled about sharing indoor space with them. Especially giant country spiders that are like 1000 times bigger than city spiders. (This is not true but it feels true.) Small spiders I can trap in a cup and put outside (I’m not a murderer), but this guy was enormous and would not be contained by human drinkware. So … I named him Luigi and talked to him a lot (mostly about how he should stay far away from me, especially while I was sleeping) and this helped me feel a bit less scared and we both survived our brief cohabitation. Later, in my new home, I wrote a book about a giant spider who was also looking for a new home. It’s a fun story I can tell at book events, and since people often ask where you got the idea for a thing, it’s a relief to have a solid answer.

I do not have a solid answer for Into the Wild Magic. This book started with a single scene of two girls meeting in a schoolyard, but I don’t know where that scene came from or why. Novels, for me, usually grow out of many things that eventually come to connect in ways I didn’t originally see. This makes it harder to answer the question “Where did you get the idea for this book?” but that’s okay. The answer is messy and indirect and basically comes down to: I recognized that there was something in that original scene that spoke to me, and I kept coming back to it and writing a little more and a little more until it started to grow into a real story. Which brings me to:

2. If you love something, there’s probably a reason.

I loved the scene of these two girls, even though I didn’t yet know who they were or what was going on. I kept those 685 words in a file for over a year, thinking about them, rereading them, wondering about them, until my writing brain finally felt that little excited spark of keep going. But before that exciting sparky stage, there was the equally important and far-less-fun waiting stage. This is when some part of your subconscious is working on the story without you. Stephen King calls it “the boys in the basement”; Damon Knight in his book Creating Short Fiction (formative in my high school writing years) called it “collaborating with Fred.”

Sometimes you write a bit of a thing and you know there’s nothing there. (Ask me about my never-finished story about George, the spear of asparagus.) Sometimes you write a bit of a thing and it’s vague or whatever but there’s something you love—something you don’t want to just delete and move on from. That’s something to pay attention to. Even if it takes you a very long time to figure out what comes next.

3. You will never get over that one terrible summer at sleepaway camp.

I have a lot of wonderful summer camp memories, but one year a group of kids full-on pretended to be my friends in order to torture and humiliate me. I had an afterschool-special moment where I overheard them talking about me on the other side of an open window and finally realized the truth of what was going on. I am now a grown-ass woman, and obviously totally past the trauma of that betrayal … except I’m not, not really. That feeling of horrible understanding that you are wrong about people you thought liked you, that they actually kind of hate you, and the inevitable follow-up questions of Is it your fault? Are you a bad person? Are you unlovable in some essential way that everyone can see but you? … those are questions that burrow deep into your soul, into your still-developing sense of self, and some part of you will be wrestling with them for the rest of your life. If you’re a writer, this means that you will write a lot about friendship, and about what it means to be a good person, and you will try to create worlds in which your characters make true connections and heal those deep fears that you may still be harboring deep within yourself. This is not a bad thing, although it can be startling to realize that there are some themes you will always come back to no matter what else you think you’re writing about.

4. It’s okay to change your process.

Writing a novel is hard. When you do it once, you may briefly believe that now you Know How to Write a Novel and that the next one will be relatively easy in comparison. You’ve got the roadmap now, and all you need to do is follow it. This might be true for some people, but I don’t think I know any of them. But you do discover some things that work. I know that it helps me to keep a novel journal for each book, to listen to certain songs on repeat during long walks to work out plot problems, and to color-code sections of notes and revision stages in Scrivener in pretty colors to please my crow brain during the hours/days/weeks/years of writing. But while writing this book, I learned a few new things and explored new methods of revising that I much prefer to what I’ve done in the past. Also, I made cool maps and watched amazing slow-motion videos of flying moths. Will these things be part of my process for the next book? Maybe! Or maybe my next book will need different process tweaks. Learning not to hold too tightly to what has worked before leaves you more open for what other things might work now.

5. You can write through Big Life Things.

Over the course of writing this book, I revised and sold and promoted a different book, met and dated the man I would eventually marry, moved in with the man and his two children, squished my apartment office into a tiny corner of our bedroom, adopted two cats, got engaged, got married, became a stepmom, and adopted a corn snake. Also, this big global pandemic happened shortly after the moving-in-together and adopting-cats thing. We had six living creatures (no snake yet) in a two-bedroom apartment under lockdown, two of whom needed help to do remote school every day and one of whom (me) had a full-time work-from-home contract editing job and two books under deadline. Also in that window, we planned and executed our tiny, lovely, outdoor, Covid-era wedding.

Small life things (unplanned errands, ill-timed phone calls, children or pets or spouses who dare to need me while I am working) can sometimes, in the moment, feel as if they may completely derail my writing for the day. But then I remember the conditions under which I wrote in 2020 and early 2021, and I recall that it is possible to write even when the world is terrifying and you have no ideal quiet time anymore and there are all kinds of things to worry about that objectively are far more important than your little book. So I try to keep that in mind, and also try to remember that making art is important even (especially) when big or bad (or both) things are happening in the world. Sometimes it’s also exactly the thing will help you make it through.

Michelle Knudsen is a New York Times best-selling author of more than 50 books for young readers, including the award-winning picture book Library Lion (Time magazine’s 100 Best Children’s Books of All Time) and the novels The Dragon of Trelian (Kids’ Indie Next List; VOYA Top Shelf Fiction for Middle School Readers) and Evil Librarian (YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults; Sid Fleischman Humor Award). She also sometimes writes short stories for older readers, one of which (“The Pigeon,” Drabblecast 476) was a 2023 BSFA finalist for best audio fiction. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with three humans, two cats, and one snake.

Michelle Knudsen: Website | Instagram | Bluesky

Into the Wild Magic: Bookshop.org | Lofty Pigeon Books (for signed/personalized copies!) | Amazon | B&N | Kobo | Libro.fm | Audible

If there’s a chance you’ve been eyeballing The Staircase in the Woods but kinda maybe sorta wanted it a bit cheaper — though here I remind you that libraries exist and are good, actually! — I note now that the book is on sale for $6.99 in e-book format for your electromatic book-reader of choice.

Which is to say, you can find the e-book at Bookshop.org, Kobo, Amazon, B&N, Apple, and so on.

The sale is, I thiiiiink, until tomorrow.

Don’t quote me on that, they don’t give me all the scoops.

Hey, so why should you check it out?

Well, at Vulture, Neil McRobert (whose own Good Boy is a must-read) has it on the list of the best books of 2025 so far, and said of the book: “The Staircase in the Woods impresses in two distinct ways. First, the haunted other-place beyond the staircase’s last step is a truly hideous proposition, making this Wendig’s darkest novel to date. Second, he writes about the adult resumption of childhood bonds with a messy honesty that sets the book apart from other nostalgia-fests. Friendship may wane, but trauma lasts forever.”

And the New York Public Library (!) calls it one of the best books of 2025 so far, as well, which, huge honor.

And the librarians of Libby said the same — one of the best of 2025.

So, y’know, you should check it out. And not just because our dryer died and our air conditioner started barfing water all over its electronics and so we bought a new dryer but the old one was propane and the new one is electric and now we need a new outlet and a new electrical panel ha ha ha ha AAAAAAhHHHHh aaahhhem. So I mean haha now’s a good time to buy my books, I’m saying. I mean I’m not saying but I’m just saying. Poke poke.

Poke poke.

Seriously, though, thanks to all who have checked out this book. It means a lot! It’s doing… like, pretty well? It has, as of today, outsold Wayward. Like, the entire run of Wayward’s sales from November 2022 until now? Staircase just beat it. And it’ll outrun Black River Orchard’s total sales in a few weeks, I think. It’s already on — I dunno, maybe it’s third printing? Fourth? I don’t keep up, because number of printings is relatively meaningless (a book could have 1000 copies in a print run, or 500, or 10,000) — but it just means, hey, the book is selling, and in fact is selling out, and they need to make more books. It’s a good place to be, so thank you.

Worth noting that I’ll be out in support of this book and the upcoming The Stand anthology (ahhhhh), The End of the World As We Know It —

First up, at Doylestown Bookshop on August 16th is DARK INK 2, an all-day horror-writer-panel-signing-stravaganza. You’ll find Nat Cassidy, Paul Tremblay, Vincent Tirado, Chris Golden, Clay Chapman, Cina Pelayo, Lindy Ryan, Todd Keisling, Sam Rebelein, Dennis Mahoney, John Langan, Chris Panatier, Mary SanGiovanni, Kay Chronister, Diana Rodriguez Wallach, and probably more?? Last year was wild. Amazing event, stocked to the rafters with folks. Here’s the day’s schedule — and I note too if you’re looking for a signed book by me but won’t be there, you can order from the store and I’ll sign there and they’ll ship it to you.

Then: I’ll be at Vortex Books and Comics — the mighty Keene-SanGiovanni joint — in Columbia, PA on August 19th, for the End of the World As We Know It Release Party. Line forms at 4PM. It’s me, Brian Keene, Bryan Smith, Richard Chizmar, Ronald Malfi, Alma Katsu, and Somer Canon.

On September 9th, I’ll be at Midtown Scholar with Keene, Somer Canon and Rich Chizmar to talk The End of the World As We Know It.

And I have one more as-yet-unannounced con coming up, which may or may not be a cool convention in Canada in November that I’ve done before, but I don’t think that’s for me to say, yet.

OKAY BYE

Psst. Hey, did you want to check out Wanderers or The Book of Accidents? You did? WELL THEN HOT SACK OF HOLY SHIT, they are both on sale for your chosen electromagnetic book-ogler. (Erm, in e-book format, I mean.)

Wanderers? $1.99.

Book of Accidents? $4.99.

This is true at a variety of e-book marketplaces —

Wanderers: Bookshop.org | Kobo | Apple | B&N | Amazon

The Book of Accidents: Bookshop.org | Kobo | Apple | B&N | Amazon

Soooo, umm, have it? Tell your friends. Okay bye.

This is going to expose me as a weird dork*, but when I was a kid I’d just sit and read the fucking TV Guide like it was a novel. I read books, of course — actual novels. But I also read the TV Guide. Like, cover to cover. Cheers and Jeers? C’mon. I’d use it to plan out my Saturday cartoon watching, and also, my post-school cartoon watching, and also my late night Friday watching. (Friday Night Videos, baby.) When it added cable schedules to the book I’d read those, fascinated by a world of truly alien programming (we didn’t get cable on our dinky backroad until I was in my teens). Oh, and holy fucking shit, when the TV Guide would announce the upcoming TV shows for next season, I’d basically lock myself in my room, poring over it. My parents probably thought I was up there with a MAD Magazine or a stolen lingerie catalog. I mean, I was probably doing that, too.

I dunno what it was. Something-something TV was rotting my brain? Maybe it provided me with some comfort in a turbulent time — I lived in a pretty turbulent house, and certainly growing up just in general sucks a lot of the time, so locking down my TV watching schedule for the coming week had the power of a lifejacket in rough seas. It didn’t calm the waves, but it made sure I didn’t sink beneath them.

Or, again, maybe I was just a weird dork.**

As I noted in the post here from the other day (“A Small But Vital Thing, Taken“), it can be hard to clear your mind — and additionally, it can be tough to focus. There’s just a lot going on. A lot a lot. There exists this sort of endless noise going on in the background of American life — and the noise as of the last couple months has gone from a low white noise thrum to a screaming chatter of pony-sized cicadas. Whole skies full of them.

But, here’s a thing —

I read a fucking magazine.

Like, a physical magazine. A magazine that exists in corporeal reality. With pages! And photos! And words! I know! I know.

And here, you’re correctly like, “What? So what? What the fuck?” And you might add, “People read magazines. Like my Grampy Joe. He loves his biannual copy of The Journal of Vintage Brass Hose Nozzles, and sometimes he takes his copy of Corn-Huskin’ Hotties into the cellar for a long while.”

But I, I don’t read magazines — not in a long time, not since the internet came along and was like, HERE IS ALL THE CONTENT THAT EXISTS, FRESHLY SQUEEZED RIGHT IN YOUR EYES EVERY TIME YOU OPEN THEM. Why kill a tree to read a magazine? All that shit is right here, right now, always.

And then, some months ago, I subscribed to a new newspaper. A physically-printed, three-dimensional newspaper.

I subscribed to The Onion.

(Note: you can do this too.)

That monthly copy of The Onion serves a keen purpose: it lives around the house, and people pass by it. They pick it up, read some bits, have a good snort-laugh, maybe ask one another, “Did you see this?” and then everyone’s day is just a little more mirth-filled than it had been five minutes before.

But at some point, I also subscribed to Wired, because honestly, they’re doing great work for the most part in this current era. It was for the digital subscription — but it also came with an actual mailed, printed copy. I didn’t really want it but it was a part of the deal, so I shrugged and said, “Sure, send me your ANCIENT RAG. Why not FAX it to me, or duct-tape it to a FUCKING PIGEON, or maybe I can swing by your office on my VELOCIPEDE.”

The first copy arrived. (No pigeon. Nary a pterosaur.)

Then, the other day, that copy found its way to the dining room table.

I sat, ate breakfast, and before cleaning up?

I opened the magazine. I did this more as a curiosity — like, “Oh, I wonder what magazines these days are up to.” Would there be a Drakkar Noir cologne sample tucked in there? Were the printed pages digital now? Would the print magazine be infected with artificial intelligence somehow??

I opened it at the beginning.

And then I started to read the magazine.

I started to read the magazine cover to cover.

I didn’t just flip through it. I read it. The magazine. The whole magazine! (Now, I did not do this in one sitting, but rather, two. I had to get up because apparently I sometimes have to do things? Which is bullshit! I’ve complained to life’s manager, but so far, my complaints have gone unregarded.)

And lemme tell you — it was great.

Further, it made me remember that I didn’t just used to read TV Guide, or MAD Magazine. I read Cracked. And Cemetery Dance. And Omni. And Fortean Times. And National Geographic. And PC Gamer.

Reading a magazine felt clarifying and calm. I didn’t look at my phone once. And nothing in the magazine interrupted me, demanding attention — no email, no texts, no pop-ups. Hell, my phone doesn’t even need to interrupt me to demand my attention. I have every notification on social media turned off, off, off, and yet I’m still keenly aware of those apps in the background. Hiding behind the curtain like little chocolates I occasionally must sample. (And because it’s social media in a Currently Bad Era, it means at least half of the chocolates I sample are filled with grub guts and skin tags.) And when reading an article in a print magazine, there’s no demand I pay money to subscribe because I already did that. I don’t need to look up a password. I don’t need to constantly find where I was in the article because somehow the procedurally-generated ads keep repopulating and shouldering the text up and then down and then up again, sometimes even just covering up whole chunks of text in their entirety. It was great. It felt like being at a lake and skipping stones. A weirdly pure, unbothered series of moments.

Now, I recognize this is not revolutionary. It’s stupid. I’m reading a magazine. It’s not therapy. It feels like detoxing but it’s not detoxing. This isn’t a radical, heroic move, it’s just me being an old man at the table reading a magazine. This is advice as obvious as, “Wow, I drank water and did some stretching and now I feel better.” But it felt radical. It felt like for a moment I was reclaiming something — something from my past, sure, but also something from my present: my attention span. Plus, hey, sometimes I need to be reminded to drink water and stretch.

So, maybe, just maybe, get a magazine subscription.

A print one.

(And Wired ain’t a bad place to start, but YMMV.)

Or you know you could read books like the ones I wrote ahem ahem ahem.*

* you already knew this, I already knew this, my family knows this, it is known

** still am, really sorry

*** I have to dance for my dinner I am so sorry but seriously if I don’t sell ten copies of Staircase in the Woods before midnight tonight my writing shed will explode with me in it, this is true and not a scam probably

When I’m writing, one of the most crucial components of that process is my downtime. And I’m talking down downtime, not just like, oh I’m gonna fuck off and do something else for a while — I mean the times where I have nothing really to do, nothing to think about, and that’s when the weird hermit crab that is my brain emerges from its shell and starts to wander around its skull-shaped terrarium, finally comfortable. I’m talking about when I’m in the shower. Or mowing the lawn. Or just taking a walk. I get to perform a relatively thoughtless action, which allows my actual thoughts to focus on whatever story I am writing during that period.

So, if I’m working on a novel, I go for a walk, and during that walk, my brain emerges, and uses its various claws and pseudopods and probing tendrils to turn my current story over and over and over again. It pokes, it prods, it pulls it apart and smashes it back together again. I think about characters. I imagine scenarios. I play endless what if what if what if games. I find plotholes and try to figure out how to spackle them shut. It’s very useful time.

It is, in fact, essential time.

And the current news era has stolen this from me.

The CURRENT NEWS is like toxic groundwater — it fills all the low places. The moment my brain stops moving for a second, in seeps all the septic shit going on here in the country and around the world. I’m usually good at turning this off, at building seawalls, or at the very least finding a way to absorb that stuff — and my feelings about it all — into the work.

But it ain’t working.

The seawalls have failed.

So, instead of getting to chew on my story problems, I’m instead huffing news fumes and gargling catastrophe juice.

Technically, this is a me problem — but I do think it’s designed somewhat from the top down. Meaning, it’s intentional. I think flood the zone with bullshit as a strategy isn’t purely just about juking the media or one’s political opposition — I think it’s a way to synaptically overwhelm the citizenry. I think this strategy is flawed for a number of reasons (“I want to eat the bee’s honey, therefore I will throw rocks at the hive” might work but, uhhh, there are better ways), but it does overwhelm. It’s where you get the narrative of, “Don’t fall for this distraction! Wait, this thing is distracting us from that other distraction! Everything is a distraction except for that one thing, which as it turns out, is also a distraction from a thing we haven’t even seen yet.” None of it is a distraction. It’s a full slate of horrors both malicious and stupid, all of them moving forward simultaneously. It is a multi-pronged attack on our attention spans, our informational fidelity, and our ability just to deal with it all. We can juggle up to three balls, and so they throw three balls, four chainsaws, an angry octopus, and a bitey mountain goat at us.

For me, just from a practical, creative perspective, this fucking sucks. It’s very hard to escape the gravity well of Endless Hypervigilance and just sit down for a while and try to imagine what the pretend people in my head are going to do about the pretend problems I’ve given them. (Storytellers are such dicks.) It’s a small problem in the grand scheme but large in the personal, creative sense — to have a mind allowed to be free of troubles is far too big an ask, but to have a mind free of relentless, endless, unmitigated troubles feels like it should be a fair request now and again.

I don’t know what to do about it, precisely. I’ve tried just tuning out the news — which, for the record, means tuning out social media almost in its entirety — and that does work, with the exception that living in the total dark brings with it its own sense of wariness. Reading the news feels like tracking the path of a tornado, whereas looking away feels like admitting, “There’s a tornado out there, but no idea where it is or when it’s gonna pick me up and take me to Oz.” Plus, I like social media. I like being connected to other writers and readers and all the stupid shitposting that goes on. And then there’s the problem that when you do go back to social media and to the news, it’s just drinking from a burst sewer pipe. At least looking at it now and again gives you the vague sense that you’re taking small doses of iocaine powder in order to become immune to it.

(Spoiler: you’re never immune. You’re just disassociating.)

For the record, I’m managing — the greatest success I have in fixing this problem is a kind of vigorous diligence to combat the hypervigilance. Meaning, I have to be actively aware of my brain’s downtime and work very hard to try to keep it offline, so to speak, in order to let it defrag the creative hard drive. Easier said than done, and somewhat betrays the point of simply having downtime at all — downtime being a thing that is supposed to be passively automatic, not me stalking the fence with a rifle looking for whatever beast lurks there in the dark to tear through the chain-link and use its many antlers to fuck up the peace garden I’ve grown.

So, I dunno. Again, I’m managing.

But I figured I’d ask —

Anyone else have this problem?

And how are you handling it, provided you’re able to at all?

(I note here in conclusion that there are wayyyyy worse things going on than what I describe in this post. This is a woe is me boo-hoo kind of post, when there are people who have lost a lot more — there are people who have lost people. People stolen. People taken. People thrown into vans or simply churned under the propaganda machine. But please forgive me the need to talk about this small and vital thing that’s been taken, thank you.)

Anyway, buy my books or I am vanquished. Bye!

Every woman who has lived on this farm has died. Emily just moved in.

When Emily Hauk’s mother dies, it’s time for her and her husband, Josh, to finally leave San Francisco. A farm in rural Nebraska is everything they want for a fresh start: clear skies, low costs, and distance from the grief back home.

They should have asked why the farm was for sale.

Three years ago a teenage girl went missing from the farm. Soon afterward the girl’s mother mysteriously died. The deeper Emily digs the more stories she uncovers of women connected to her new home who’ve met their own dark ends.

With each passing day Emily’s sanctuary slips further away. The barn seems to move throughout her property as though chasing her. Her mother’s favorite music drifts across the cornfield. She swears she saw blood in one of the farmhand’s trucks. And the screams that wake her are not fox howls, no matter how many times her husband says otherwise. If she wants to claim this place as her own she’ll have to find out the truth before whatever watches from the cornfield takes her, too.

1. The reason you can feel “seasick” in the plains is the same reason it might feel like a barn or silo is chasing you.

The story seed for The Farmhouse came during a discussion about Baba Yaga folklore with a group of writers at The Storied Imaginarium. This witch’s house was built on chicken legs to move where she needed, the people who would come to ask for help, and those who would actually be granted it. It was a great conversation, but I kept thinking back to when I lived in the Midwest.

Landmarks like silos or barns were harder to track without any reference point on the horizon. It was just a sea of green or gold and this building jutting up from it. Almost as if it were on legs.

And then all I wanted to do was write a story where the barn was chasing my main character. Because that’s how it feels driving along a two-lane road for miles.

Digging into it, the phenomenon is the same reason some people may experience “seasickness” while driving along I-80 cutting their way across the middle of the US. Much like being in the ocean, the horizon is endless without a mountain or collection of buildings to center you. And so you drift. Even in the corn.

2. I needed readers to feel seen

I set out to write The Farmhouse as an “onion book.” I want readers to have the choice to escape with Emily as she solves the mystery around the missing girls. But if they have the appetite for something more, I hope they’ll dive into the way we process grief, the fear of not trusting their own mind or feelings, and the complicated dynamics within her marriage. Readers who want the thrilling mystery, horror atmosphere, and the depth can peel as deep into the book as they want. All flavors of readership are welcome.

But while I’d always intended the plot to include gaslighting, in writing I was forced to face the systemic way many of us self-gaslight. The “I’m overreacting” or the need to justify feelings because you don’t want to be seen as overly emotional. While this book is centered on Emily getting justice for herself and for the women who have died on her farm, by the time I finished this book all I could feel was the need to tell readers “I believe you.”

There are so many women and female-presenting persons who have their voices diminished and their knowledge dismissed. I hope this book helps them feel seen and understood.

But also if they’re just there for a creepy moving barn, ghosts, and gaslighting…that’s rad, too.

3. Chickens Could Eat Your Teeth

Look, writers have to research unique things. Did I need to find out about what chickens are capable of eating? Yes. Did I need to find out if they could eat human teeth? Yes. Now you have to know, too.

While they can eat human teeth and be totally fine, it would not be a great way to hide any evidence, because they wouldn’t break it down. The hens would be fine though. It’s a bit like how some birds eat gravel to help break down their food.

Anyway, chickens could eat your teeth. You’re welcome.

4. Turns out I really miss writing about music

I’m a former music journalist. It was my first career and I wrote for popular alternative newsweeklies and music magazines, and I loved it. Because I love music. I actually started writing fiction after leaving the journalism industry because I missed writing daily.

The Farmhouse has a soundtrack. The main character Emily’s late mother was a music producer. So part of her grieving her and remembering her are moments tied to specific songs. Building out the music layer of this book with songs that would give insight into who her mother had been added this extra spark for me in writing the book. I had to pick the perfect tracks for you to hear the book, too.

5. Home is always home

This book is also a bit of a love letter to Nebraska. I grew up in rural Nebraska—although I lived in a town much larger than the one nearest Emily and Josh in the book—and there was something nostalgic about getting to write about the beauty there. (I really regret having to cut a scene about Runzas, because iykyk.)

I wanted this book to capture the beauty of rural living. Nebraska is gorgeous. The sunrises are stunning. There’s a peacefulness and a slower pace that can provide respite and a place to be with your thoughts. But it’s also isolating and lonely. There is a lag to get to places, to get to your friends, to get help. Farm life is a hard life. It’s a different way of living, and while the characters in this book don’t work the land, they still have to adjust to being twenty minutes from an emergency vehicle arrival.

Many years ago, I brought my husband to visit my family in Nebraska (who absolutely still live there!) for the 4th of July. He was most excited about doing his own fireworks. We were driving along country roads, as is the way of things, and had to pull over so he could go into a cornfield in real life. The experience (and, yeah, there’s a pic) blew his mind. Being inside real cornfields is far more disorienting—and beautiful—than the corn mazes you find at fall festivals and pumpkin patches. That fish-out-of-water surprise and curiosity definitely fed into The Farmhouse.

ABOUT CHELSEA CONRADT

Chelsea Conradt (she/her) writes twisty speculative thrillers and horror including The Farmhouse. Her books are packed with both murder and kindness because we can be more than one thing.

When not writing stories that make you question what’s real, she is likely watching a baking show or a true-crime documentary. She is nothing if not on brand. Chelsea lives in Texas with her husband, son, and two big dogs. Find her online at chelseaconradt.com.

The Farmhouse: Bookshop.org | Libro.fm | B&N | Amazon | Kobo

Heracles was raised to revere his Auntie Hera, Goddess of Family. As he grows up to become the strongest man in the world, he spreads word of her glory and raises a family of his own. Then an Olympian God strikes, driving him mad and destroying his family. Shattered, Heracles embarks on a series of labors, confronting the greatest minds and monsters in the world to find which Olympian is responsible. The only god he still trusts is Auntie Hera.

There’s one problem: Hera is the one responsible, and she’ll do anything to hide the truth. She’s always detested Heracles, the illegitimate child of her husband Zeus. As Goddess of Family, Heracles is a living insult to her entire being. She only realized what she’s set in motion once it was too late, and now Heracles discovering the truth would destroy them both. She must keep him from solving the mystery. Desperate, she stalls by sending him off to face impossible monsters, but each time he winds up adding another creature to a newfound family. A family that could wage war against the entire heavens.

Yes, this is a story where Heracles tries to befriend every bloodthirsty monster in the world.

The legend of Heracles was one of the first things my parents read to me, and I definitely pretended to be him as I ran shirtless around my backyard. As I grew up, I wondered about all the gaps in those stories, like why Heracles wasn’t more haunted by his actions, and where the heck Hera went after starting everything. Writing this book was about finding a beating heart in the mythology. I learned a lot, including…

MY FAVORITE GREEK HISTORIAN WAS A FRAUD

Ever since college, I’ve loved this little green book called The Library by Apollodorus, translated by the famous James George Frazer. The Library is a concise collection of Greek myths, often telling an entire myth in a couple of pages. It’s so plain, never pausing to dwell on the magnitude of what’s happening. The old generation of gods has been wiped out? Next. A huge war comes to a bloody conclusion? Next.

But “Apollodorus” was a popular name in ancient Greece, and sometimes Romans would write under that name when they wanted to sound authentic. The “Apollodorus” who wrote The Library was an impersonator, living centuries after the time of the actual Greek Apollodorus, and long after the time of Homer and Sophocles. Historians often call him “Pseudo-Apollodorus.” He was trying to garner fame by collecting the great Greek stories in a single space—a library, of sorts—while also mixing some Roman values into them. Such cultural prickles wound up influencing my book in ways I won’t spoil.

HERACLES HAD A TWIN BROTHER (WHO WASN’T A DEMIGOD)

Heracles’s story is weird from his very conception. One day Zeus spied an attractive queen named Alcmene. Being the absolute worst, Zeus decided to woo her by shapeshifting to look like her husband, Amphitryon. That night, Alcmene conceived the demigod Heracles, Zeus’s new favorite son. You’d think the story would end there, with everyone mad at Zeus. But no.

It turns out that Alcmene and Amphitryon were super into it. They hopped into bed and, in defiance of medical science, conceived a second child immediately. This child was Iphicles, totally mortal, no superpowers whatsoever. Iphicles and Heracles coexisted as wombmates, and then Iphicles immediately cut in line to be born first.

If you think this is weird, imagine being Hera: both Zeus’s wife *and* Goddess of Fertility, meaning her phone was blowing up all night.

EVERYBODY YADDA-YADDAS THE GIANT BULL

One of the issues with Heracles retellings is that after a few labors, the audience gets tired of him punching yet another giant animal. It starts with an invincible lion and then moves to a many-headed hydra. After that, do you really care that he’s fighting a really big boar?

So many versions turn the middle labors into a montage. He chases a deer, he fights a bull, who cares, what else is on? For a story that is essentially about twelve amazing feats, storytellers clearly find some more amazing than others. It actually gets funny, looking out for which labors an author skips over.

If you know my writing, you know I love monsters. My answer in all these cases was to explore the personality of the creatures. What is life like for a boar on an otherwise desolate and abandoned mountain? Which other hunters have come after it before? By treating the creatures as characters, many of the middle labors became my favorites. Having a Heracles who collected the animals in a found family rather than fighting them allowed so much more meaning to pour out.

HERACLES’S WIFE DOESN’T HAVE TO DIE

Among the many retellings, Megara often lives! My novel pivoted the moment I realized this. The classic story is that Heracles is driven mad by the Furies, and in his madness he slays his wife and children. He destroys the very family life that Hera is supposed to enshrine and protect. Everything he loved is gone.

But as I read more historians and versions of the Heracles myth, his wife Megara kept popping up. One time, she saw him off on his labors and wished him luck. Then at the end of Heracles’s labors, she appeared and married Heracles’s nephew. There was even an anonymous poem about Megara commiserating with Heracles’s mother over how their family was destroyed.

She was very busy for a dead person.

Megara’s fate changed wildly depending on who was telling it. Realizing that I wasn’t mythologically obligated to fridge Megara changed how I breathed. The entire book pivoted. While grief over loss is important to Wearing The Lion, this change allowed both parents to process the grief in different ways. I got to dig into the clash of their attempts to help each other,  how they succeeded, and how they failed. The entire arc of the book changed with Megara’s influence.

NAMES MEAN THINGS? WHAT A CONCEPT!

Heracles wasn’t born with that name. He was “Alcides,” named after an ancestor of the mortal family. There are several explanations for why he took up his new name, but it always means the same thing: “Glory of Hera.” It carried a bitter irony, given how much Hera hated him.

This scheme of new names with serious meanings runs through Ancient Greece. Take Diomedes as an example. Meaning “Cunning of the Gods,” it was a powerful name, suggesting a brilliant tactician. That’s why everybody wanted to be Diomedes. Heracles tangled with a Diomedes who owned man-eating horses. A while later, another Diomedes popped up alongside Odysseus and Achilles in the Trojan War. Yet another Diomedes tried to conquer Hindu-Kush around 95 BCE.

They all wanted the cool name. Every kid on the playground wants to be Spider-Man.

This practice was so common that Heracles wasn’t even the only “Heracles.” Other people sought to suck up to Hera for luck.

About John Wiswell:  John Wiswell is a disabled writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. He won the 2021 Nebula Award for Short Fiction for his story, “Open House on Haunted Hill,” and the 2022 Locus Award for Best Novelette for “That Story Isn’t The Story.” He has also been a finalist for the Hugo Award, British Fantasy Award, and World Fantasy Award. He is the author of Someone You Can Build a Nest In, a Nebula award winner and Year’s Best pick by NPR and The Washington Post, and Wearing the Lion. He can be found making too many puns and discussing craft on his Substack, johnwiswell.substack.com.

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