smart-as-a-bee

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A really thoughtful take on Mickey7 from the Los Angeles Review of Books

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Do you want a personally autographed copy of ANTIMATTER BLUES, the super fun sequel to MICKEY7? Who doesn’t, right? Click here to order one from our pals at The Dog Eared Book.

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If you’re in WNY, maybe think about stopping by to see me at the Henrietta Public Library from 7-8pm on August 4th. I’ll be doing a reading, talking about how this book came to be, and signing copies. Hope to see you there.

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Hey there, friend-os. Feeling sad because you finished reading #Mickey7 and have no more Mickey-related reading material? Well, I have a solution for you: pre-order the sequel, ANTIMATTER BLUES, and then spend the next eleven months pining obsessively for it! B&N is running a 25% off special thru 4/23 with code PREORDER25, so jump on it today.

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Update on Friday’s reading/signing: we’re going to be in the 4th Floor Program Room in Loyola’s student center, starting at 5pm. Looks like the room has a nice view of the lacrosse field, so if I start to ramble you’ll at least have something interesting to look at. Really hope to see you there.

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Baltimore-area friends: I’m going to be doing a reading/signing at Loyola University on Friday, March 25th at 5pm. It should be a fun time, so mark your calendars, tattoo it on the back of your neck, or whatever else you do to remind yourself of stuff. I’m not here to judge.

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Just FYI - if you’re in the Rochester NY area, I’ll be signing copies of Mickey7 at the Pittsford Barnes & Noble on 2/15 from 2pm - 4pm.

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Hey there, friendos. Just FYI - Friday is the deadline for ordering a personally engraved copy of Mickey7 from The Dog Eared Book. Also, if you've already ordered one, please DM me any requests for the signature. If I don't hear from you, you'll get something from the Wheel of Signatures. Are we old army buddies? Did we once share a single magical day in Budapest? Were you the third grade teacher who inspired me to become a writer? The Wheel of Signatures knows all and tells all. 

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Um...

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Hey! Do you want a personalized, signed copy of MICKEY7? Dumb question, right? I mean, this is the book that inspired Brad Pitt to give me a canvas sack stuffed with non-sequential, un-marked tens and twenties, and i will write literally anything over my signature for you. Want a profession of our undying friendship? Done. A haiku dedicated to your goldfish? No problem. A doodle of a duck with human legs? Weird, but sure. Why not? So? Click here to bop over to The Dog Eared Book and make it happen!

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Aaaaaaand I’m back.

Following the tragic demise of Curious Fictions, I’m bouncing my blog back to here. Check back for updates on MICKEY7, my progress in turning big pieces of wood into smaller pieces of wood, and more.

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One of my favorite children is up on The Overcast today. It’s got philosophy, rock climbing, stabbing, and the fantastic narration of J.S. Arquin. Give it a listen if you have a few minutes to kill.

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Listen

Listen.

They lined us up then, along the edge of the pit. We stood shoulder-to-shoulder, shivering because they had taken our coats. We stood silent, heads bowed, staring down into the freshly turned earth. We breathed in the crisp winter air, and waited.

                                                       They called us together, to the center of the town. They called us from loudspeakers mounted to the tops of their trucks, told us that if we came to the square, they would give us the mercy of bullets, but that if we fled, it would be fire. A few of us ran. They were true to their word. By ones and twos, and then all together, we came.

                                                       It was done for holiness. They told us that much. It was God’s inscrutable will, a solemn duty, to be undertaken with sorrow rather than joy. They told us this as they killed us, but the grins on their faces betrayed them. And we asked ourselves: would we have done the same to them, if we could have? If chance or fate or Providence had placed the whip in our hands, would we have cut them down in their thousands, then millions? Would we have murdered their children and burned their homes, taken their lands and their lives and their names, tried to pretend that they never had been? We told ourselves we would not have, that our rule would have been kind and our justice fair.

We told ourselves this, and it may even once have been true. But in the dark of the night now, we know that it is far too late for justice. We have lost too much. If we could murder them all, we would do it.

Listen.

I come from the north, from the cold, windy shore of a great, frozen lake. Ours was one of the last towns to fall to the UnAltered. We had seen the news, knew what they had done as they spread like a brush fire up from the south. We should have fled, should have crossed the border into what remained of Canada. We should have never come back. But there was a base nearby, and a loyal General. The UnAltered were a rabble, my father said, the products of random inbreeding and inferior genes. The army would hold. And hold they did, along the northern bank of the river, for a week, and then two. Every day, though, more soldiers crossed over. The General was killed in his bed, and what remained of the army melted away.

I was eleven then, and Altered, but not to the eye. A bit taller, a bit stronger than I should have been, and never once sick in my life, but I could have passed. My sister, though—sixteen years old, with white-blonde hair and porcelain skin, clear blue eyes, and features symmetrical to the micrometer. My father thought to disguise her, to dye her hair a mousy, uneven brown, blotch her skin with makeup, dress her in shapeless smocks. It didn’t matter. Our neighbors denounced us on the very day that the UnAltered crossed the river.

Twenty years on, and I still dream of that day. From my hiding place in the attic, I hear the shouted summons from the yard, then bare moments later the crash of the front door shattering. I hear my mother’s short, sharp scream, and the bark of the rifles.

They failed to find me that day, but in my dreams I feel the heavy tread of their boots on the stairs, hear the low rumble of their voices as they pace through the attic, looking for me. I crouch in the black space behind the knee wall, trying and failing to stifle my sobs. Finally they stumble on the hidden door, and I wake up screaming as a hard, calloused hand grasps my ankle and drags me, writhing like a maggot, out into the light.

Listen.

We are few now, and scattered, but we are not gone.

We bear a mark, each of us, a stamp on our genes, put there by the Engineers who changed us. It is this that allowed the UnAltered to hound us, even after all the ones with visible changes—the ones like my sister—were long dead. The scanners are everywhere, in airports and schools and hospitals, and when the mark betrays us, we are killed, even now.

It is this mark that will save us.

A Destroyer is coming, like the tenth plague to the Egyptians, carefully prepared in our last secret places. It will spread through the air and the water, through birds and rats and insects. It will find the UnAltered wherever they hide, taking their first born, and also their last. Taking their wives and their mothers, their daughters and sons. Taking all.

The mark on our genes will be lamb’s blood on our lintel. The Destroyer will pass us by. 

Listen.

Spring has come to the mountains now, and the long winding road to the valley is clear. The net has been silent for almost a month.

The wide world is empty.

The wide world is new.

It is time, I think, to see what it has to offer.

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Dust

You’re peeling back your inner gloves, aching in every muscle after a twelve hour shift, when you feel a faint pressure against the inside of your left wrist where the thick latex is doubled over. You barely have time to register the sensation before it disappears with a soft pop, and a cloud of tiny motes appears around your hand, sparkling in the harsh white lights of the decontamination room. Your heart lurches and you yank your hand back, but it’s a spastic movement, directed by your terrified lizard-brain rather than the part of you that thinks, and those few centimeters of exposed skin at your wrist pass through the cloud before you stagger backward, cradling your arm to your chest. You look down to see a thin dusting of gray specks on your skin, then feel a brief, almost-painful tingling as they disappear, leaving behind an angry-looking scattering of tiny red bumps.

You stare at the pattern of spots, frozen, until they begin to form red constellations against your sweat-grimed skin. The burner is less than two meters away. Will charring up to the elbow be enough? You try to think back to your training, but your mind is a howling void. Has it been ten seconds yet? Twenty? How long does it take the nanos to worm their way into an artery? You should probably go all the way to the shoulder now, but you still haven’t moved. You’ve seen what the burner does to an arm or a leg before, and a tiny voice inside your head is whispering that all you need to do is wait. Just a few more seconds now, and there won’t be any point. You won’t have to do it at all.

A voice speaks in your ear now, a loud voice, caught half-way between boredom and alarm. It’s the duty officer, asking if there’s something wrong. He can see you standing there staring at your wrist, of course, but he must have missed the spore pod bursting under the pressure of your folded-over glove, must have missed the spreading cloud of dust.

Not his fault, really. You missed it too. The pods are everywhere out there by now, encysted, clinging to the walls of buildings, to the interiors of abandoned cars, to the cans of food and bottles of water you were sent out to scavenge. You think back, try to remember when your outer glove might have gotten pulled back just a centimeter or two, when a gap might have opened up that let the pod sneak in between the protective layers, in where the bath of solvents that doused you before you were allowed in the first lock couldn’t find it.

“Hey,” the duty officer says. “Seriously, is there a problem? Do we need to run a second-pass decontamination?”

You look up at the camera mounted above the inner door. Second pass decontamination. A polite way of asking whether you’d like to be incinerated.

“No,” you say finally. “No, I’m fine. I thought I saw something, but I’m... good. I’m good.”

Your voice is shaking, and you’re sure that his hand is hovering over what you imagine as a giant red button on his control panel. You close your eyes and wait for the flames.

“Well hurry up,” he says finally. “We’ve got three more waiting to come in.”

You open your eyes, nod without speaking, and slowly finish peeling off your gloves. They go into the burner, as does the latex-lined jumpsuit you wore under your hazmat gear. The smell of your damp, clammy skin is unbearable. You think of a story you read once, years ago, in the world before the dust, about a man being forced to dig his own grave. You didn’t understand it then--thought it was ridiculous, in fact. Why would he do it? Refuse, and die now. Agree, and die an hour later. You understand now, though. You’re a walking corpse, far more surely than the man in the story, and the grave that you’re digging is not only your own. You know this, just as you know that the flames would give you a far quicker, cleaner death than the dust will.

You know these things, but your lizard-brain doesn’t, and it’s been in full control since the moment you saw that cloud of dust coalescing around your hand. All it knows is that death is final, and that no price is too high to pay for another hour, another minute, another second. All it knows is not yet. Not yet. Not yet.

Would it make a difference if you had a family? A wife, or a husband? A beautiful, pig-tailed daughter, waiting for you inside? You remember stories of fathers charging into burning buildings, of mothers offering up their bodies to shield their children from hails of bullets. Maybe. There were other stories, though, probably more true, of mothers and fathers selling their daughters’ bodies to buy another day’s bread. Who’s to say what kind of parent you’d have been, if the dust hadn’t come?

You hear a dull thumping now, coming from the outer lock. There are three others outside, waiting their turns. Will the dust you’ve left behind find them? Doesn’t matter. The nanos inside of you are multiplying already, converting your bones and blood and organs into copies of themselves. In a few hours you’ll bloom, and that will be that.

Naked now, you walk slowly to the inner door. You close your eyes, take a deep breath in, and let it back out. Is that a twinge already? Can’t be. The pain shouldn’t start for an hour or more. You lift the cover from the keypad, and punch in the first three digits of your access code. You hesitate over the final digit. Your hand is shaking. You hit clear, lower the cover, and take another deep breath. And then, as if from a great distance, you hear the words: I’m infected. It takes a long moment for you to realize that they’ve come from you.

The duty officer is shouting, but you can barely hear him now over the roaring in your ears and the hissing of the snapped-open fuel vents. You close your eyes again, and as the droplets of aerosolized gasoline settle onto your skin, you think back to a day years ago, before the dust. You were nineteen then, standing on the knife-edge peak of a place called the Dragon’s Tooth. The sun was high and hot in a cloudless blue sky, and the green farmland of the Shenandoah Valley was laid out below you like a salt map, six hundred meters down. The shadow of a hawk passed over you. You looked up, squinting into the sun, as he circled around and called to you. You feel the warmth of the sun on your face, and for a moment, just at the end, you can almost believe that you’re there again. The hawk dips lower. You reach out to touch him. The sun in your eyes is blinding, as the world flashes white.

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My God, the Fans

A guest post by Auston Habershaw, author of the just-released Dead But Once, as well as many other awesome things. 

Like a lot of mid-list authors, I dream of the day I’ll hit it big. Lines of fans at my book signings. Book tours. Movie deals. The words “best-selling author” preceding my name. Action figures based off my characters. Fan art. Video game tie-ins. The whole Star Wars/Harry Potter/Game of Thrones experience.

But maybe I’m not thinking this through.

I mean, did you see how some fans reacted to The Last Jedi? They were howling for blood! I mean, I liked the movie, personally—a bit poorly paced and awkwardly plotted, sure, but still very enjoyable. And, like, there’s no requirement that anybody has to like a movie. But this was more than “not liking.” There were people out there accusing Rian Johnson of ruining their childhood. They wanted the movie expunged from the record! They were screaming and howling and carrying on and circulating petitions, as though Johnson had done them some kind of personal disservice.

I gotta say, it kinda freaked me out. Maybe hordes of devoted fans was something of a double-edged sword. I mean, I’ve always known rabid fans existed, but I didn’t really think they were in such numbers that they could actively harm or harass creators. But then, I guess I got my rabid fandom out of the way through my teenage years, a bit before the internet could really reach the likes of George Lucas, and I’m showing my age.

Still, I was taken aback. At some point, the big franchises like Marvel and Star Wars stopped being the province of their creators and, instead, are now beholden to legions of superfans on some level. I mean, you try a little gimmick like have Captain America working for Hydra all along, and the world freaks out. Granted, I did think that was stupid, but I wasn’t going to stalk the writer on Twitter or accost them at conventions. They’re telling a story—they’re entitled to do so. If I don’t think it sounds cool, then I won’t partake. Simple, right?

I guess not so simple. I guess maybe I’ve been naïve about what success in the entertainment industry means, whether it be movies, comics, tv, or books. I see my stories as my own, for better or for worse. There are a select group of individuals whose input I seek when I’m writing (my agent, my editors, my beta readers), but ultimately I’m going to tell the story I want to tell. People are welcome to like it or not like it, but I don’t think they get a say in what I do. You can’t crowd-source storytelling like that without rendering it limp and lifeless.

Of course, I’m not going to sit here and say “no thank you” to a huge fanbase. Of course not! I want people to love what I write! I want people to be inspired by my stories! I guess, though, I need to realize that with such popularity comes something else—something political and complicated and sometimes unpleasant. And anyway, this is not my problem anyway—I don’t have those legions of fans objecting to my latest move. I should be so lucky, right?

And maybe there’s some kind of middle ground. A place where creators can create and fans can comment and everybody can remain civil. Or maybe not—maybe the kind of fervor that leads to a franchise like Star Wars precludes the rational. This is lizard-brain stuff—showing Luke Skywalker like The Last Jedi did was a challenge to people’s essential world-view which, against all odds, was in some way based off a fictional hero created by George Lucas in the late 70s. It’s not just a story for them; it’s something religious. I guess that’s what weirds me out about it all: I want people to buy my books, but I don’t want to be their prophet.

But I guess, in the end, you don’t get a choice. Some select number of us authors are anointed, by Fate or Providence, to be so keyed into the Zeitgeist that our works become inspirational for decades to come. That’s a heavy responsibility, it seems. I like to think I am equal to facing that challenge, should it occur, but who knows?

I guess it would qualify as one of those good problems to have.  

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So one of my favorite children, “Tessa,” is featured at Curious Fictions this week. Give it a peek if you have a chance.