Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 6

Embrace Your Personal Power with 20 Queer-Specific Rituals

Queer people go through all kinds of unique milestones and rites of passage as we grow into our true selves. Whether you are coming out, attending your first Pride parade, or changing your pronouns, this book will help you enter these rites of passage thoughtfully and spiritually.

Explore rituals for honoring chosen family, going through gender transition milestones, exploring and affirming your gender and sexuality, entering your first queer relationship, and more. Enhance your rituals with a variety of magickal allies, including deities and community ancestors (such as queer activists and leaders).

Regardless of your skill level or spiritual tradition, Queer Rites makes it simple to connect your lived experiences to your magickal practice and commemorate occasions in a way that resonates with your unique and wonderful self.

Includes a foreword by Ariana Serpentine, author of Sacred Gender, and rituals by guest writers Storm Faerywolf, Misha Magdalene, Brandon Weston, and Rev. Ron Padrón.

It’s both satisfying and bittersweet to write the book you needed when you were younger.

As I interviewed queer people of various backgrounds and identities, it became clear how many of our landmark LGBTQ+ milestones are tainted — or worse, defined — by negative experiences. I, and many of those I spoke to, wondered how our experiences of embracing our identities would’ve been different had we celebrated them more, or at least been able to approach them more intentionally. So this book is kind of an instruction manual for how to create a sacred and empowered container for major milestones of the queer experience…and one I wish I’d had decades ago. It’s both satisfying and heartwarming to provide that experience for others, but also bittersweet knowing that I didn’t have this book when I most needed it.

No book is easy to write.

I honestly went into this one like, “Hooray, a book that’s basically an instruction manual: Easy as pie!” Um, no. As it turns out, I had to do just as much research and re-working and re-visiting and re-writing as I did with my first book, Queer Qabala. Instead of reading dusty old tomes, though, I did a lot of interviews with people whose lives and experiences were different from mine, so I could make sure the book was as inclusive as possible.

(And I also read some tomes. There was a lot less dust involved, though. There are some pretty great books on queer magick that have come out in recent years!)

A consistent soundtrack helps produce a consistent product.

While writing and editing this book, I listened to the Baldur’s Gate 3 soundtrack on a loop, and I credit that, in part, for helping me keep a consistent voice and tone throughout, and also for motivating me through the grind of writing and editing. (I even included the composer, Borislav Slavov, in the acknowledgements.) Video game music is super good at pushing you to keep going. It’s what it’s designed to do. (Though sometimes it also motivates you to play video games instead of writing. Your mileage may vary.)

Take time off the day job for every edit round (if you can).

I was lucky enough to be able to take a few days off work right before my manuscript was due to my publisher, and then again when I had to turn in the first big edit round, so that I could sit and truly focus for 8-10 hours each day and didn’t have to lose time context-switching/getting into the groove for several separate editing sessions. This made the process more efficient and it helped me keep the whole book in my head at once, so I could more easily catch things like, “Oh wait, I already said this three chapters ago” or “this contradicts something I said earlier” or “this doesn’t match the format.”

Try not to write two books simultaneously on top of a day job.

Right as I started working on this book, I got a golden opportunity to co-write another book, Sagittarius Witch, that had an aggressive deadline. I was able to put Queer Rites aside for a bit and focus on the other book, but then as soon as I turned that one in I had to shift focus back Queer Rites, and there were times when the edit rounds of both overlapped and I ended 2023 feeling super burned out. And I still wasn’t done with Queer Rites at that point! I decided to take 2024 off writing (though I still had to do a lot of editing), and now I am going into 2025 feeling like I still need more time to recover.

Bonus thing: Book launch parties don’t have to follow a standard script!

For this book’s launch, I co-produced a big queer cabaret with a friend of mine. We gathered some of the top talent in the DC/Baltimore region, hired a venue, lined up some vendors, partnered with local radical bookshop Red Emma’s to sell the books on site, found some generous sponsors, and sold 160 tickets to fill the venue. It was wildly successful — we sold over 85 copies of the book! But it was also a ludicrous amount of work for months leading up to it, and there’s no way I could’ve pulled this off without my co-producer, who had all the connections and savvy for how to pull these kinds of events together from a decade of experience. It was certainly more fun than rolling into a bookstore to talk a bit and do a signing, but it took much, much more preparation and had a lot more moving parts in the planning.

Enfys J. Book (they/them) is an author, priestx, blogger, teacher, performer, singer, songwriter, and comedian. They wrote the Gold COVR award-winning Queer Qabala: Nonbinary, Genderfluid, Omnisexual Mysticism & Magick (Llewellyn, June 2022); co-authored (with Ivo Dominguez, Jr.) Sagittarius Witch (Llewellyn, 2024); and wrote Queer Rites: A Magickal Grimoire to Honor Your Milestones with Pride (Llewellyn, 2025).

They are also a founding member of the “funny, filthy, feminist, fandom folk” band The Misbehavin’ Maidens, the creator of a website on queer magick called majorarqueerna.com, and the host of a podcast called “4 Quick Q’s: Book Talk with Enfys,” where they interview pagan authors using questions determined by a roll of the dice. They have taught many classes on tarot, Hermetic Qabala, magickal rites of passage, and queering one’s magical practice at conferences and events around the world.

Queer Rites (U.S.): Bookshop.org | B&N | Amazon | Buy an autographed copy

Author website: https://majorarqueerna.com/

There are five towns in the U.S. named “Normal” and seventeen-year-old Gemma Leonardo plans on visiting every one of them. Right after she escapes Children’ s Hospital in Harrisburg, where she’ s being treated for anorexia. Enter Lucas Polizzi, a high school wrestler with bulimia and, more importantly to Gemma, a getaway car. Sick of being told they’re sick, Gemma and Lucas team up for a themed road trip to “the Normals” on one condition— they can’ t mention food, ever. But as each passing mile puts their lives at greater risk, they soon realize it is their growing love and friendship, not a place on a map, that will put them on the path to recovery.

Story inspiration comes from the strangest places

The U.S. is replete with weirdly-named towns. As someone who grew up in Nutley, New Jersey and drove past Intercourse, Pennsylvania on my way to and from college every semester, I kind of knew this. But when I began pouring over the pages of a Rand McNally Road Atlas and typing “U.S. towns with unusual names” into search engines, I discovered—in addition to the five towns named Normal—there’s Ding Dong, Texas; Booger Hole, West Virginia; Boring, Oregon; Toad Suck, Arkansas (don’t worry they also have Hope); and Santa Claus, Indiana. The latter inspired my characters to take a detour enroute to Normal, Illinois. Having them drive along Candy Cane and Jingle Bell lanes and visit the post office on Kris Kringle Circle provided excellent fodder for plot and dialogue.

Writing for a living is a lot like a road trip`

Some of my favorite stories to read, watch, and write, are road trips—Lonesome Dove, Thelma and Louise, Amy and Roger’s Epic Detour, and of course, Wanderers. My first young adult novel was about a teen girl who goes on a cross-country road trip to avoid violating a restraining order after accidentally blowing up her ex-boyfriend’s car. It was a breezy, summer romance published by Simon Pulse. The three novels that followed were also set in the summer and considered beach reads. One was published by Henry Holt Books for Young Readers, the other two by Sourcebooks. Eleven years after my debut, I tried to switch lanes, and while my latest novel is also a road trip it’s not easy, breezy, or summery. In my journey as a published author, as my writing got better, my publishers got smaller. I went from having an agent for 14 years, to selling my latest book without one. I’m not sure what point I’m at on my writing journey. Am I at a rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike? Somewhere in the middle of America? Approaching my exit? I do know that this latest book has taught me that I need to take a deep breath and enjoy the ride.

The way appears

The poet Rumi said, “As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.” To put it in Dory-speak, “Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.” Not sure if Rumi would agree, but that’s my take. Writing this book taught me perseverance. To wake up every day and do the work of a writer. Sometimes that means sitting in front of my laptop, sometimes it means taking a long walk, or people watching and eavesdropping and jotting down ideas on my phone. I’ve also started writing freelance non-fiction articles again. Until this week, I last published a book in 2018, though I’ve written three full manuscripts since then, including the one that became FINDING NORMAL.

The journey is better with a ride or die and a baby raccoon

My critique partners were with me every step of the way while drafting this novel. They are my ride or dies who hold me accountable. At the beginning of their road trip the two main characters in FINDING NORMAL, Gemma and Lucas, find an orphaned baby raccoon. To some people, raccoons are disease-carrying, kitten-killing, dumpster-diving trash pandas, but to me, with their five-fingered “hands” and black masks to prevent nighttime glare, they’re more like the ambidextrous (times two) quarterbacks of the animal world. Mama raccoons are fiercely protective of their kits (babies), who stay with them until they’re a year old, and researchers have found these adorable bandits are highly intelligent problem solvers. Whether or not they’re smarter than your average bear is up for debate, but their intelligence is on par with rhesus macaques monkeys, which leads me to the last thing I’ve learned.

Don’t make eye contact with the monkeys

This is something I didn’t necessarily learn from writing this book, but something I’ve learned from writing books in general, and from my critique partner who recently visited Bali. Upon checking into her motel, she and her partner were warned to not make eye contact with the long-tailed macaques on the property. “They see it as a sign of aggression,” she was told. Similarly, author-types who value their stomach linings and sanity should not engage with reviewers, booktokers, bookstagrammers, random Goodreads folks, and any other readers who take to social media to insult a novel that may have taken you six years to complete and feels more like your third child than a story. Take it from someone who learned early on, no good can come from engaging. Even when it’s obvious they’ve never read your book and/or published a review that got key facts (like the main character’s name) wrong. Do what I tell my dog Molly when she’s running around the house with a spent toilet paper roll in her mouth. Leave it!

Jennifer Salvato Doktorski received a 2024 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She is the author of five young adult novels including, FAMOUS LAST WORDS (Holt), a Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of the Year; THE SUMMER AFTER YOU & ME (Sourcebooks), a YALSA Teens’ Top Ten nominee; and FINDING NORMAL (Fitzroy Books 2025). She has published articles and essays in national magazines including Cosmopolitan and began her writing career on the obit desk of a local newspaper, where she learned the importance of deadlines and developed a lifelong love of news and coffee. She lives with her family in New Jersey and spends summers “down the shore,” where everything is always all right.

Finding Normal: Bookshop.org | B&N | Amazon | Asbury Book Coop

Jen Doktorski: Website | Instagram

It’s gonna be a stupid, horrible day. We all know that. It’s going to be full of what passes for pomp and circumstance amongst the set of rich tacky dickheads that are about to take full control of the country (they had most of the control anyway, to be fair), and then there will be a bunch of shock and awe, except I dunno how shocked we’ll be, and we definitely won’t be in awe, and many of us will want to break our Dry January streak to drink vodka from our toilets, only coming up for air long enough to shovel more ice cream into our mouths. It’s the first day of our new kakistocracy slash oligarchy, the kakistoligarchracy. It’s going to be like if William Gibson wrote Idiocracy. It’s going to be a stupid, horrible day.

But I think there are things you can do.

None of these things are revolutionary.

I don’t think today is the day for revolutionary.

I think today is the day you do the best you can do.

I think first thing you do is you donate to a charity, maybe a few charities, especially one who are going to have to do some heavy lifting in the years to come. And it’s MLK Jr. Day, too, so maybe factor that into your giving efforts. Some options could include: Southern Poverty Law Center, National Black Woman’s Justice Initiative, RAICES, ACLU, Center for Reproductive Rights, Trevor Project, Trans Lifeline, Arbor Day Foundation, Woodwell Climate Research Center, World Central Kitchen, and so forth.

Charity Navigator is a good place to find and vet charities, btw.

Giving directly to folks in need too is good, via GoFundMes — no links here because those are populous and fast-moving, but I’m sure you’ll see ’em on social media today and in the days that follow.

Reading books is wonderful. Read a book. Reading any book — from a bookstore, from the library (which to be fair are not open today), from your own shelves? Yeah. Books are good food. Doubly so if you take the time to read a book by, you know, anybody who will be hurt by today’s chaos. Author Jessica Conwell has a list over at Bluesky, for instance, of trans authors — it’s a fount of books to be bought and read, including Jessica’s own Ghost Flower. Go read some Hailey Piper, Eric LaRocca, Colson Whitehead, Charlie Jane Anders, Kosoko Jackson, V Castro, Cassandra Khaw, Cynthia Pelayo, the river of reads that awaits you is wide and it is deep. Here’s a good list of Black Authors, too. Shit, you want a great book to read today that’ll be fast and ferocious? Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark. Go find that, read it. If you’ve read it, re-read it. Memorize it.

Look away from the news if you gotta, or stare dead at it if you feel so inclined. (You gotta look eventually. Apathy will serve no one in the years ahead.) You don’t have to do it all today. You don’t have to do anything today. You can just try to be happy today, or calm, or whatever you need to be. Nobody’s asking you to spend it all and burn it up and out.

Look out for your heart and help others with theirs.

Reach out to folks. Accept others reaching out to you if you can.

Check in with your communities, with whoever comprises them.

Take a walk, if it’s not too cold where you are (and it probabably is, shit). Do a little exercise. Breathe in and breathe out. Think about something you wanna do, something good, something nice. Plan a little vacation. Write a little poem. I don’t know. Distract yourself with small pulses of love and light.

Listen. It’s gonna be a weird bad day.

It’s just the first of the weird bad days.

And if we’re being honest, it’s not even the first of them, it’s just another in a long line of weird bad days where the weird part and the bad part are spiking simultaneously, like an outbreak of a particular kind of illness. It’s not just turbulence on a flight, it’s a turbulent flight, from start to finish, snout to tail.

But we can get through it, we can land the plane.

This country is a mess, it’s always been a mess, always will be a mess, but it’s our mess. We’re with it, in it, and have often helped to make it, and that’s not defeatist, that’s not apathetic, it’s just realist to see that we’re a fucking goofy nation that has stumbled and staggered up and down some big hills and into some mucky fucking ditches. Just try to remember we need to climb the hills to see the beautiful views, you know? And first we gotta get up and out of the damn ditch. Beyond that? I think at the end of the day the people we’re with, that we surround ourselves with — that matters. It’s the people we love and care about and who care about us in return. I think it helps me to remember that it’s not like we’re some shining castle in the clouds. We’re a messy place full of messy people and I think it’s good to recognize that, and to see that we can still make motions to make it better than it is, even when it fights us like a bucking, sweat-foamed horse.

Then again, I don’t know shit about shit and might feel different tomorrow. Don’t let anyone chastise you for feeling sad or upset. Toxic optimism isn’t going get us through shit. We feel how we feel and those worries, those concerns, they’re valid. It’s okay to see that shit’s gonna be hard.

Take care of yourselves. Take care of others. Be taken care of when needed.

We’ll need your fight soon. The fight continues. The fight always continues.

Good luck. May the odds be ever in your favor.

Thanks for being here.

(As a postscript, I took that photo of the frozen flag back in 2009 — and I looked at the date, and the date was Jan 20th. Who knew.)

(Anyway, here’s a final photo I took of a squirrel doing a bump of Nature’s Cocaine. May it bring you some measure of joy.)

Dear Writer Types: a reminder that this blog is a place where, if you have a book coming out, you can submit to me for a Five Things I Learned Writing [insert your book name here] guest post! If you’d like a good example of one, look no further than Alex White’s Five Things I Learned Writing August Kitko and the Mechas from Space.

How this works is:

You email me, at least a month before the release date of that book — email me at terribleminds at gmail dot com. (Don’t use the contact form here, I’m finding it’s kinda broken and I need to figure out why.)

You tell me what the book is, when it’s coming out, all the details, and then I email back and I say YAY, and then you make sure I have the guest post a week before it’s going to post. (It will usually post on the Thursday of your launch week though that might shift a little given what other posts are going live that week.)

The guest post should be in *.doc or *.rtf format, ideally, and with minimal formatting. I’ll copy/paste right into WordPress here and do the light formatting myself.

I’ll also need a high-rez, good quality copy of your cover! If it’s too small or low quality, I won’t post the post. I tend to lead with that cover and it’s the first thing people see here or, more likely, in their inboxes.

The format of the post is pretty easily discernible from the one I linked above, but the gist is:

[cover image]

[book flap copy/description, sans endorsements]

[no intro, just hop right into the first thing you learned]

[then list, y’know, in order, five things you learned, and these five things don’t specifically have to be about writing — they can be something you learned about yourself, or other people, or weird facts, or literally anything that falls under the umbrella of “I learned this while writing this book”]

[alex wrote a bonus thing; you do not have to write a bonus thing]

[then: author bio]

[finally, any author or book links we need to reach you and buy the book — buy links, author website, any social media we need to see, etc. — and please note that I prioritize Bookshop.org links and use affiliate links there]

And that’s it.

You do not have to be an author to send me this — agents and publicists/editors are welcome to be the ones to submit!

Please also note, this is open to traditionally published authors first and foremost, and that includes from smaller publishers, too. This is not an open call for self-pub folks, not because I don’t like you or your books, but rather, because in the past when I’ve opened to self-pub folks, it has bombed my already-under-duress inbox with a lot of submissions that I have no real ability to vet — and now, in an era of AI garbage and glurge, I don’t want people to buy some awful ChatGPT slurry from a link here. While I’m not responsible for the content of the books, obviously, I can still do my best to curate a trustworthy experience and, as much as it is wise to be wary of gatekeepers, sometimes a kept gate is a good thing when it comes to stuff like, again, Gen-AI slop. Apologies in advance!

Why submit for this at all?

Well, it won’t make your book a bestseller. But it does go out to over 11,000 subscribers (and you can also subscribe below, at the bottom of this page, to receive this blog and therefore receive the excellent FIVE THINGS I LEARNED entries that roll up in here), and is probably better than most social media posts thrown into the void.

How best to write such a post?

You know, I kinda feel like your best approach is not to try to sell the book. Obviously, you want people to read it, and you want to talk about it — but I just mean, don’t view this as a Capital-M Marketing opportunity so much as a chance for you to speak earnestly and excitedly about the thing you wrote. Naked promotion is pretty easy to reject — BUY MY BOOK is just noise. But telling us a story about the book — because all stories have stories — is interesting, and personal, and I think connects us to you and the work.

Can I just send you the guest post directly?

Hey, please don’t! I’d rather give you a green light first.

Do you edit the post?

If I see light tweaking is needed, I may do that instead of passing it back to you. If more than that, I’ll just not post and ask you. (Though please also recognize my time is limited, sadly.) If the post is just a hot mess, then I’ll let you know sorry, it’s not going up. So, y’know, please don’t send me hot messes! Please and thank you.

What if you don’t respond?

I try to respond quickly when these come in, but also, life is both busy and my inbox is a garbage scow moving down a river on fire, and further, the spam folder is occasionally randomly hungry. Pinging me again usually does the trick, and apologies in advance!

And I think that’s it!

If you have one dollar and ninety-nine pennies laying around, you could take that filthy lucre and shove it into your computer or other digital device and that device will then give you 800+ pages of pre-peri-post-apocalyptic goodness, a sci-fi-horror AI-slash-pandemic novel.

That’s right, Wanderers is on sale today in its electromagnetic book format for $1.99 for some reason? It’s a book I wrote before 2020, I book I started before 2016 — and it definitely has a lot to say, somewhat inadvertently, about our present moment and our emerging future.

So, should this tickle your bits, go grab it from any of the electric bookmongers out there — Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Apple, etc.

And hey, maybe you’re like, but that’s too cheap, I feel bad, and I say to you, don’t! Get what you can while the gettin’s good! But if you were so inclined to give a little more, you could add on its sequel, Wayward, and wouldn’t that be fun?

Anyway. Wanderers. Cheaper today, so maybe go grab it if you haven’t, and check out the sequel, too, if you’re so inclined.

Hello! Preorders of books are good! I’m just over here saying that for no reason at all, and definitely not because I have a book called The Staircase in the Woods coming out on April 29th ahem ahem cough cough. Why are preorders good, you ask? Well! For one, they’re good for the bookstore — a bookstore can ensure that they have the stock in place and also, hey, it’s an early sale, which is a win for them. It’s also good for the publisher but who cares, they’re publishers, they’re fine. But it’s good for, y’know, the author because it’s good for the book. A bookstore receiving some preorders knows to ensure that book is on their shelves in good number — maybe even putting it on a display. It also sends a good message to the publisher about the author, saying, hey, this person has readers who are willing to preorder their books.

And hey, one could argue it’s a good thing for you, the reader. In part because, hey, you guarantee you get the copy you want on the day you want it. And sometimes, preorder comes with other little bonuses or swaggy bits. (More on that as to how it relates to Staircase in a moment.)

Of course, you don’t have to preorder. It’s not essential and you should never feel bad for not being able to do it. Listen, the book will be out there whether you preorder or not. It’s just a nice thing you can do, if you wanna do.

(You can also instead ask your library to order a copy for you to read.)

And Staircase is getting some nice early press.

It’s on Paste’s Most Anticipate Horror of 2025.

Screenrant shouts out 15 of 2025’s horror releases to watch out for.

Goodreads calls it one of readers’ most anticipated horror novels of 2025.

And hey, I also remind you that if you pre-order from my local, Doylestown Bookshop, you’ll also get some bennies —

a) it’ll be signed and personalized to you, and mailed to you directly

b) you’ll get some very excellent Natalie Metzger STAIRCASEy stickers

c) you’ll receive a personalization that includes your very own

havdhr ebbz va gur ubhfr orlbaq gur fgnvef

(no, that was not a cat walking across my keyboard, I don’t have a cat, unless maybe there’s a ghost cat nobody told me about — it’s a code, which means you’ll need to use a ROT13 generator to solve that, as it contains a spoiler for the book, so decipher only if you want that spoiler)

You can get that pre-order here from Doylestown Bookshop.

If you don’t care about the signed/personalize/sticker/secret thing angle, you can also preorder from your own local, or from Bookshop.org.

OH, and a final reminder —

Book clubs!

If you’re choosing this book for a bookclub, and that club is five or more people and we can finagle a time, I will gladly do a 30ish minute virtual visit with your book club to discuss the book after you’ve read it. (These are a blast to do because at a book launch, I have to talk around a book rather than address a lot of the fiddly fun bits. At a book club we can get right into it.)

(You can ping me at terribleminds at gmail to set that up — don’t use the contact form on here, it seems to be busted and I’m working on it.)

OKAY, that’s it, thanks for checking out the book and spreading the word.

The wildfires in Los Angeles are as devastating as they are horrifying, upending lives and livelihoods left and right — and some people are going to need some help through this nightmare, so I’m dropping a couple links here, and you’re also free to pop into the comments to leave some donation outlets (though please note, some might get flagged as spam automagically, and I will endeavor to pluck them from that oubliette).

First up, two folks, two writers in fact, who have lost their homes —

AC Bradley, who is a most excellent writer and delightful person (and who is connected to a REDACTED project of mine) — the GoFundMe for her, her daughter and her sister is here.

And Ben Mekler, wonderful TV writer (and also very funny human online) just got a new house and had his second child, only for him and his wife to lose that house in the fire. The GoFundMe is here.

And beyond that —

California Fire Relief

California Fire Foundation

California Community Foundation

Global Giving’s CA Wildfire Relief Fund

World Central Kitchen

Pasadena Humane Society

And as always, going forward, be sure to get out and vote for people who actually believe in climate change and who endeavor to help in crises like these. Be additionally wary of misinformation and disinformation about the wildfires — seek not just information from reputable sources but confirmation from multiple reputable sources before sharing. We are in a fractured, unstable information environment and remaining vigilant against bad actors and those invested in our harm rather than our future is key.

The author makes a story. But a story also makes the author.

What I mean is this: I think as writers, as authors, as storytellers and artists, we build ourselves along the way out of the narrative spare parts we find on the journey of growing up. We collect them unconsciously, a crow snatching up buttons and coins, and we edit them into our own personal narratives. Some of this is obviously good and necessary; as we figure out who we are as a person, we also figure out who we are as writers. We figure out what we like, what we don’t, what challenges us, what drives us, and those becomes part of our tale. But sometimes, it presents a problem. We pick up unnecessary expectations, we gather jealousies to our chests, we clutch close many falsehoods disguised as truths, and we fuse them brutally to our idea of who we are as storytellers in this world — branches from someone else’s tree that we graft to our own.

Sometimes instead of finding our own motivations, we are handed motivations and accept them.

Sometimes, we accept the negative thoughts and problematic outcomes told to us, and they become so much a part of our story we think we told them first instead of having inadvertently copied them into our narrative.

Sometimes, the ever-shifting industry leaves us feeling rattled and false-footed and makes us doubt who we are, why we’re here, and if we can even tell the stories we once set out to tell.

We hear that we have to write this kind of story, not the one we want to write; we see that oh this writer is doing better than us so we have to change ourselves to be more like them; we make permanent decisions based on temporary conditions.

(And here I am reminded that recently I read an article about how the Broccolis, the family in charge of the creative side of the James Bond franchise, are keeping Amazon — who now own Bond! — at arm’s length because they don’t like how Amazon calls Bond “content.” And in that article there was a great quote from Barbara Broccoli when she recounts advice from her father: “Don’t have temporary people make permanent decisions.”)

Put differently, I know a lot of writers across the spectrum of experience — from neonates to published authors to bestselling ones — who are really going through it right now. They’re questioning their place in the grand spectrum of things — trying to see themselves and where they belong in the world of both authors and their stories. And to some degree, this is good! We’re supposed to gaze inward. We need to evaluate and reevaluate that about ourselves and the tales we tell. It is perhaps essential to keeping dynamic, to being active in our own upkeep and not just settling into a rut.

At the same time, it can be hard because that reevaluation can leave us wanting — it can make us feel lesser than we are, or not up to speed, or simply undeserving of a path forward. This forms a rut all its own.

I’ve noted in my book (sorry to plug, but Gentle Writing Advice is out there for you if you choose to find it) that self-doubt isn’t always a bad thing. Doubt can open a door to a better place — it can tell us, okay, the doubt is instinctive, something is off, it’s urging me to through the door to somewhere I need to go. But it can also hamstring us. It can poison us. It can be a lie, doubt born of falsehood, doubt with teeth, doubt serving only to halt our momentum through that door instead of pushing and prodding us forward.

New writers can feel like they’re never going to get there. Midlist writers can feel like they’re never going to break out. Veteran writers can feel like they’ll never do anything new. You worry you’re writing the wrong genre, the wrong way, the wrong this, the wrong that. The story we tell about ourselves darkens, suddenly turbid with this pollution of uncertainty and self-doubt, and so I think for me, maybe for you, 2025 can be a year where you change that story. Because we are authors of it. It doesn’t author us. We have the power of narrative and the power of editing that story.

Now, that doesn’t mean you can magically change conditions on the ground — you can still only control what you control, but what you control is the story in front of you and why you bring yourself to tell it. It’s that last part that maybe matters most, here. The story you tell can be less about the weight of expectation and certainly less about all the external valuations — but rather, the story you edit and rewrite and tell anew can be one about how, no matter what anybody else thinks, no matter what the conditions of the industry are, no matter what poison has been dripped into your ear —

You’re still a writer, and the writer writes.

Is this oversimplistic? Sure. Does it pave over doubt? It shouldn’t — like I said, some doubt is good. Some doubt is clarifying. A knife at your back pushing you forward, forward, ever forward. But you can relearn why you do the thing you do. You can tell the story that you’re a person who finishes what you begin, who tells the story they want to tell, who cares about the craft rather than the industry, who is good to themselves rather than cruel. You can change those parameters of your story. You are author and editor.

So, for me, and maybe for you, that’s my way forward in 2025 — just making sure that the story I tell about myself as a writer is the one I want to be telling, not the one I’ve just unconsciously and unwittingly accepted. It’s about a surefootedness and confidence in myself, and less about the outcome others control and more about the outcome I can command.

Don’t like the story you have about yourself as a writer?

Tell a simpler story. A kinder story. And most of all, a better story.

I should note here I was going to do a RAH RAH RAH FUCK ‘EM 2025 IS GONNA BE A KICK TO THE DICK SO KICK IT IN THE DICK INSTEAD kind of a post, but that just feels like — well, you’ve heard it before. You know it already. We’ve been there on and off for the last eight years. It’s gonna get bad and weird and we will have to meet it on the battlefield, and we can use our work as opposition, as therapy, as vengeance, as admonishment and as optimism and as escape. But for today, I felt like it was better to get at the deeper heart of who we are as writers, and how our own perverted (no not that kind of perverted, relax) narratives about ourselves can fuck it all up.

Maybe that helps you.

Maybe it doesn’t.

Either way, I hope 2025 is a year of many words for you. And I hope just as you give those words your power, those words give you power, too.

See you in the new year, little chickadees.

(You can find 2024’s resolution here, if you care to click.)

Blah blah blah, some stuff happened in 2024, stuff’s gonna keep happening in 2025, woo hoo, we did it, there’s your recap and your look forward all rolled up in one HASTY AND MEDIOCRE BURRITO, huzzah, *kicks sad burrito under couch, sits down on couch to play more Balatro*

*waits*

*stares*

*stares harder at you*

*because you’re still here*

UGH GOD OKAY FINE

I usually take this time at the end of the year to recap the year prior and to gaze longingly ahead at what’s to come, and as noted in an earlier post, I’m feeling this year like my mind is firmly rooted in the present moment, unwilling as it is to step one foot backward or forward lest my aforementioned mind get swept away in the whole uh-oh oh no of it all.

Globally, news-wise — I mean, haha, what the fuck is there to even say? The enforced rise by rich techbros of shitty environment-killing resource-stealing content-thieving AI? The ascent of the combo-pack of oligarchy and kakistocracy (oligkakistrarchy?)? The incoming administration? The less said at this moment is probably for the best. It’s all going to be very very stupid and very very demented and we all have a front row seat. I’m not looking forward to it! The end.

Personally, you know… for me, I think things are good? Happy family, a pleasant existence, still two dogs (though one is really slowing down now, poor Loa) — and I dunno, surrounded by good people. Went to Portugal for a couple weeks and that is the most delightful, most beautiful place. The soft, gentle decay of it! The street art! The thousands of hills! The food, the people, the architecture, the natural beauty. Truly a favorite place.

Speaking of travel, I also had the fortune of getting to hang with a couple of my besties, Kevin and Delilah, this year, as we went on a short mini-tour of the Midwest, and found that fun and impactful. Which I suppose bleeds over into the professional, but note that first and foremost those tours are personal, because I like those two people a whole lot and would gladly follow them into heaven or hell just for the company. It’s simply convenient that we’re all writers and have a tax-deductible reason to hang out and meet readers and booksellers and the like.

Professionally, things are… also good, for the most part? This past year, Monster Movie! came out and, I dunno, middle grade is tough right now but I had a blast with it and hope readers do, too. I did some school visits there and found them both a) really rewarding and b) very very difficult, like, off-the-charts hard for me. Not because I don’t love hanging out with students and talking about books and horror and stuff, but boy, if you’re in any way an introvert who drains their batteries having to be “on” in front of people, ha ha holy crap, talking to kids is triple the energy drain for me. It’s a lot, a lot a lot, like, you can’t just be on, you gotta be ALL THE WAY ON, every slider set to max, every knob spun to the top and then broken off. (I think this is a controversial opinion as, having talked to a lot of kids’ authors, they don’t seem to suffer this effect, so this is very likely just me!)

(You can order Monster Movie! here.)

Paperback for Black River Orchard landed, and I will say it’s gaining its second — or even its true — life in that format. I’m sure a cheaper buy makes it easier, but also the new cover is slick, and also maybe it just needed time to find its readership. But I think it has! Big jump in readership on that one in just the last few months. (Weirdly, or maybe not weirdly, actual apple-picking season seemed to be the biggest juice-up for sales?) I’m glad people are finding it and ohh hey it won the Dragon Award for best horror?!

(You can grab Black River Orchard in paperback here.)

I guess there were new editions of my Star Wars Aftermath books out — these in trade paperback. And if that makes you happy, then I am happy for you. I understand those books are controversial to some people, and not much I can do about that, but I had a lot of fun writing them and playing in that sandbox, and I try not to succumb to abject bitterness at how I was treated by those in charge of that storyworld, but mostly I fail, and bitterness continues to be the primary taste in my mouth after having worked in that universe. But if you enjoy them, I am truly glad. And if you don’t like them? Then hey, sorry, can’t be helped, go write your own.

Ummm. What else?

I post APPLE REVIEW REELS now at Instagram. Why? I dunno! I like doing them though. Maybe I should start a TikTok account, perhaps mere hours before it is made illegal and ejected from the app stores!

(Don’t worry, I won’t pollute anybody’s TikTok with my presence.)

I’m on Threads now, obviously, though I still far prefer Bluesky. A lot of user control there, and zero algorithm. That said, social media is a slow poison! But it tastes like candy, so there I go, like a squirrel slurping up antifreeze.

What does 2025 hold?

I’ll probably get to soon announce the two-book-deal I can’t yet really talk about (just know it’s about demons demons demons baby woooo demons).

I might get to talk about some of the new Wanderers TV developments.

I might get to talk more about my next middle grade, too, which is less horror and more “weird Wendigian meta-take on portal fantasy.”

In April, I get to release a book I am truly proud of, The Staircase in the Woods — it’s still very much a Chuck Wendig book, but at the same time, I feel like it’s something different for me, too, in a variety of ways. It already has a lot of early reviews over at Netgalley, and I’m really happy to see people responding well to it. The book means a lot to me and maybe it’ll mean a lot to other folks, as well. I almost think of Book of Accidents, Black River Orchard, and now Staircase in a kind of thematic trilogy. Maybe you’ll see what I’m talking about. You can preorder from Doylestown Bookshop, to remind you, if you want an early jump at the book and also some additional book-related goodies. I also might have something neat to announce about Staircase soon enough.

I will almost certainly be doing some bookstore-a-go-go visits for that book, so keep your apples peeled for that. Trying to figure out with my publisher what the shape of that tour can and should look like!

Where else will I be? Updated schedule so far —

Jan 10th, at Doylestown Bookshop in support of Clay Chapman’s wild new horror, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes. (Details here.)

Jan 30th, I get to chat with Eric LaRocca at the NYPL in NYC, in support of his darkly wonderful At Dark I Become Loathsome. (Deets.)

I’ll be at Emerald City Comic Con in March, I think.

More stuff as I have it!

EDIT: oh fuck obviously too there’s THE STAND anthology, holy crap. I’ll be doing a signing for that, too, more as I know it. You can preorder it here.

I’ll be traveling, only semi-professionally, to Scandinavia over the summer — kinda doing a Denmark -> Norway -> Sweden thing. For kicks, and also for some researchy things.

(So if you have advice on traveling in that region, GIVE ME IT NOW.)

(Please and thank you.)

As to what else 2025 brings? Man, I do not know. I really feel like we traveled off the edge of the map, into that hazy, unwritten “here there be dragons” part. At least from a professional standpoint I’m… growing concerned that publishing is really starting to build for itself a certain genre bubble (I say that without any issues regarding any genres or the writers of said genres) and I worry what happens when that bubble pops, as it inevitably will. (And if TikTok really does go the way of the dodo, what happens to BookTok? Which is, as with many things, both an excellent and problematic influence on books, authors and publishing?) I dunno. I think it’s gonna get weird. All of it. Everything. Gonna get weird. So I’m gonna get weird in response, and maybe you can do the same and we will overwhelm the Bad Weird with the Good Weird and return balance to the Force.

Whatever the case, thanks for being here, thanks for reading. I’ll see you tomorrow with a fresh tasty WRITERS RESOLUTION 2025.

And away we go.

I think my brain is not okay. I don’t mean to suggest I’ve got actual worms up in there, but the Current Era combined with Holidaytimes has really just turned my skull into a malfunctioning music box. First, I whiffed on ever doing a Terribleminds Gift Guide for the year — I blame this in part on the fact Thanksgiving was later than usual, and by the time I was like, “Yeah, let’s do a gift guide!” it was way too late to make that actionable. Second, I’m now tasked (by myself) to offer up the Books And Other Stuff I Liked In 2024, and when I go to access that file folder inside my head-computer, I just get a series of pop-ups and janky ads.

I suspect this is in part because my brain is choosing to live implicitly in The Present. It’s trying not to look too close in the past, lest it accidentally traipse across one of the various news-related landmines there. And it’s definitely not looking forward because that feels like time-traveling to the inside of a black hole. So mostly my brain is in goldfish mode. It exists in this moment and blinks blissfully inside its glass uhhh — and here I’m going to note it took me about 60 seconds to conjure the word “fishbowl.” I was like, “well, aquarium, obviously, but that’s not the right image. It’s like, there’s this glass orb where you put a newly-acquired fish? A fish orb, a fish jar, a spherical fish apartment, a goldfish palantir,” before finally landing on oh right —

Fishbowl.

Brain not okie-dokie.

It’s fine. It’s fine! I’m sure it’s fine. Everything is fine and nothing hurts!

So, here is a list of some of the things I liked in 2024.

This list will be far from exhaustive because, again, my brain is just moths and dust, I fear. (Further, on the topic of books, it gets weirder because I read a bunch of 2025 releases in 2024, and do I mention those here? Or not? Or what? I may! I may not! Even I don’t know what I’ll do!)

Let’s begin.

Books

Right out of the gate, I think my favorite read of the year was Premee Mohamed’s The Butcher of the Forest. It’s perfect. She’s an astonishing writer. Everything she writes is great, but this is one of those books — like Sara Gran’s Come Closer — that I know I’ll read again and again. It’s eerie and empathetic and pointed and uncanny and written in such a way so as to not be full of itself, to be fully accessible to any reader, while still being both small and profound in equal measure. It’s a treasure.

Actually, it’s been a damn fine year for novellas — M.L. Rio’s Graveyard Shift and Delilah Dawson’s Guillotine both come to mind. DARK, SINISTER SNACKS, these books, and you need them. Oh! Oh also: When Among Crows, by Veronica Roth. I read that in… January last year? So it counts.

Other books of note: A Mask of Flies by Matthew Lyons is fucking great. Paul Tremblay rocked Horror Movie, a filmic head trip through the remake of a purportedly cursed film. Gabino Iglesias’ House of Bone and Rain is some dark, powerful, vengeful stuff. CJ Leede’s American Rapture is an absolutely A+ unique take on the apocalypse, and honestly pairs really well with Clay McLeod Chapman’s upcoming Wake Up And Open Your Eyes. Oh! And At Dark, I Become Loathsome, by Eric LaRocca.

Weirdly, I read both the Chapman and the LaRocca on vacation in Portugal this past year, and also, I’m going to be doing events with them both next month — Chapman and I at Doylestown Bookshop on Fri, Jan 10th at 6pm. And LaRocca I’m joining in NYC

In nonfiction I really, really loved A Natural History of Empty Lots, by Christopher Brown. That and I also read Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which is not new, but was very important to me this year, both personally and in the writing of Staircase in the Woods.

I know I read other books this year, right?

Oh! I know. I read my first proper Stephen King in a long time — I am, like many, a student of his earlier works. Sadly, though, I’m less studied when it comes to the stuff he wrote in the last 10-15 years. I read Fairy Tale. I liked it a lot. Took a while to get going to where it was going but even there, you’re just happy to spend time in the world of his writing. I have deeper thoughts that maybe I’ll get around to sometimes in the future.

Did I read more this year? Surely. Do I remember what those books were? Not at the moment. Forgive my porous mind. Onward.

TV

What We Do In The Shadows ended, and it was perfect. Shrinking and Bad Monkey continue to prove that Bill Lawrence knows what he’s doing (see also, Scrubs, Ted Lasso, Cougar Town). The Penguin was surprisingly excellent. Diplomat season two was not as strong as the first season but I still loved it a lot. Was Shogun this year? Amazing, obviously. Ripley had a whole different vibe than the film, closer to the book, and I found the black and white cinematography of it truly stunning, one of the most stunning shows I’ve laid my eyes on in recent memory. Arcane, also, totally beautiful. I needed time with it to remember what the fuck happened in season one, but it’s really staggering in terms of how well that animation looks, how perfect the action scenes are, how not video gamey it is even as it’s very video gamey? It’s something special.

Oh and maybe my favorite thing?

True Detective: Night Country. The best. Give Issa Lopez all the things. The money, the awards, the laurels, the high-fives.

I very much did not like The Bear S3, and I generally love that show. Hm.

Movies

Were there movies? Did I watch them? *grits teeth, takes a bumpy ride in the time machine*

Longlegs, Alien: Romulus, Challengers, Dune Part Two, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Babes, My Old Ass, Problemista, The First Omen, Late Night with the Devil, and what else?

Oh wait, no, I know — my two favorites this year:

Love Lies Bleeding, and Monkey Man.

There were other movies, I’m just not calling them my favorites of the year.

Moving on.

Games

Balatro is easily the most addictive game I played this year. So addictive it may have just eaten all the other games.

Favorite game overall might be Rise of the Golden Idol, which is just a delight.

Alan Wake 2 was amazing, though I think that came out in 2023 initially.

Thank Goodness You’re Here was incredibly funny and clever. Not necessarily a great “game” in the sense of “contains puzzles and various challenges,” but was a delight to go through and experience.

Pacific Drive was rad.

Animal Well consumed my life for a while, and I felt like it was nearly perfect in understanding how to create a challenging game that still builds you up to those challenges well? A game that hard that never feels frustrating is aces.

Very much wanted to love both Star Wars: Outlaws and Veilguard, and very much did not love them. Liked both. But neither really sang and I tapped out of Outlaws (though I’m told I should go back and try again) and Veilguard just feels like a weirdly watered-down Pixared version of a Bioware story. It’s good. But it also feels very video gamey — the maps don’t feel like maps, they feel like “levels,” and you’ll come upon an area of glowy, patiently-waiting bad guys same as you would in, say, Halo. The whole thing just isn’t coming together for me, but a lot of people I know love it, so maybe it’s just me.

Music

This year, loved new music from St. Vincent, Jack White, the Linda Lindas, Phantogram, The Last Dinner Party, Carter Veil, Louis the Child, Sprints, Sleater-Kinney, Rosie Tucker, Remi Wolf, Oceanator, Amyl and the Sniffers, Crobot, Childish Gambino, plus holy shit there was new Poe this year? Poe. POE. Just a little bit — all tied to Alan Wake 2, but hey, I’m a man thirsty in the desert, I’ll take whatever drops of water I can touch to my tongue.

I think one of my favorite and then saddest discoveries was Mama Zu — it’s like, “Wow, she’s great, I love this,” *googles* “oh god she died??” Crushing discovery of such a vital talent just showing up and then being gone from us too soon — sad for us, for her friends and family, fuck.

Your Turn

Okay. Flood the comments — what’d you like from this past year? Recommend me something. A song, a book, a game, whatever.