Someone You Can Build A Nest In launches on April 2nd!

My debut novel is extremely nigh! It releases April 2nd in the U.S., and April 11th in the U.K.. In this post, I'll walk you through everything you need to know.

Let's start here: what is Someone You Can Build A Nest In about?

Shesheshen is a shapeshifting monster who lurks in the ruins of an isthmus, fending off monster hunters and other vile humans. After she is poisoned and driven off a cliff, she's rescued by Homily, a bookish and gentle lady who mistakes Shesheshen for a fellow human. Homily nurses her back to health, and Shesheshen is shocked to find herself growing attached. Homily seems to be an outcast like herself. The more they fall in love, the harder it is for Shesheshen to hide her true identity. She has to confess. But just as she's about to come clean, Homily reveals why she's visiting in the isthmus. Homily is hunting a shapeshifting monster. Has Shesheshen seen it anywhere?

You can read the first chapter for free at Reactor.

The pre-release experience has been overwhelming. I keep getting tagged by readers who got advanced copies and have fallen in love with Shesheshen and Homily. Recently The Library Journal gave Someone You Can Build A Best In a starred review and named it the Debut of the Month for April. Ingram named it one of the three Best of the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books for 2024. Someone You Can Build A Nest In has also graced numerous Most Anticipated Bookslists, including Literary Hub, Apple Books, Polygon, FanFiAdddict, Reactor (A.K.A. Tor.com), and Winter is Coming.

The responses from authors has been amazing, too.

"Someone You Can Build A Nest In is sweetly furious, darkly funny, and gruesomely wholesome. It's a love story for the unloved, a happily-ever-after with a higher-than-average body count. I just adored it."
—Alix E. Harrow, New York Times-bestselling author of Starling House and The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Surprisingly sweet, unsurprisingly horrific, and entirely humane—only John Wiswell could have written this monster and her book, and I'm so very glad he did.”’
—Arkady Martine, Hugo Award-winning author of A Memory Called Empire

“I love the wonder and the darkly enchanting danger of this story. It makes me think of fairy tales, but John Wiswell understands what so many have forgotten: that true fairy tales are gruesome and magical at the same time, and he nails it here.”
—C.L. Polk, bestselling author of Midnight Bargain and Even Though I Knew the End

“Someone You Can Build a Nest In is the future of fantasy: a fairy tale with boundaries, an
imaginative world created in the shape of collective values rather than the boring old id, a portal to a place you've really never seen before instead of just a princess in a different outfit. This novel is going to change the entire genre.”
—Meg Elison, Hugo and Locus award-winning author of The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

Pre-orders are available at all major book websites.

Bathrooom Monologues Movie Awards, 2019 Edition

It's almost February 2020, so of course we're all talking about the best movies of 2019. For many that includes movies that only came to the U.S. for the first time in 2019. Naturally I'll disagree with some of the Oscar winners. More naturally, I don't understand what some of the categories mean. But nothing shall dissuade me from telling a democratic body of people who devote swaths of their lives to film that their mass conclusions were wrong. So here we go!

The Robbed Award

Going to the movie that got no play last year
and is just as good as whatever won Best Picture

WIDOWS

Bathroom Monologues Movie Awards for 2018

It's almost March 2019, so of course we're all talking about the best movies of 2018. Naturally I'll disagree with some of the Oscar winners. More naturally, I don't understand what some of the categories mean. But nothing shall dissuade me from telling a democratic body of people who devote swaths of their lives to film that their mass conclusions were wrong. So here we go!

The Robbed Award

Going to the movie that got no play last year

and is just as good as whatever won Best Picture

THE FLORIDA PROJECT

Never Drown Alone: A Story of The Ring, Friday the 13th, and True Love

I'm busy enough that I don't write much fanfic anymore, but this summer I made a secret pact with Ryan Boyd. Pursuant to our pact, I wrote a story idea that I've been thinking about for years. It's a crossover between two Horror icons that requires you be fairly weird to enjoy it. 

Friends, I love being fairly weird. 

Ahead of all the Horror movie blogging I'll be doing in October, I want to share this with you. I call it...

Never Drown Alone

She was like the revenge of all the snarls of hair stuck in all the drains in all the world. There was more hair than skin, swirling out at all angles as she darted through the chlorine-reeking pool. Unlike the other students, she went lap after lap without ever coming up for air. Jason never saw her face.

A voice behind him taunted, “You haven’t done your laps.”

Jason knew better than to turn around, and he still did it. It was a reflex.

There was nobody there – not corporeally. How he hated ghost bullies. A red balloon floated in front of Jason’s eyes.

Pennywise chided, “What’s wrong? Do you need your mommy?”

Another voice said, “Don’t you know? He can’t swim.”

That one was Paimon. Pennywise and Paimon, the new popular kids in school. The popular kids always hunted in packs. You never knew when the next attack was coming.

They were both invisible, save for the balloon that drifted closer to Jason.

Jason held up his hands, and tried to swat the red balloon away. It burst, the sound echoing throughout the swimming pool, and he lost his balance for a moment. Someone shoved him hard and he stumbled toward the pool, careful to keep from falling in.

Pennywise asked, “Afraid you’ll drown again?”

Paimon said, “We’ll help you learn.”

Jason barely braced before the next shove came in a gust of fetid air. It was harder than any shotgun blast he’d ever felt, and sent him sprawling through the air. The humid warmth of the pool sprang up even before he hit it. Then he was underwater, that chlorine sting in his eyes, and up his nose, and filling his lungs. The water always got in Jason’s lungs.

This was drowning, and he thrashed, and in his idiot reflexes, tried to stab the pool. Pools didn’t bleed, and waving his arms, he barely got his nose above water, the stuff streaming through every hole in his mask. His eyes were muddied, and he couldn’t even see the invisible figures that blinded him.

Pennywise said, “Looks like you’re short another lifeguard.”

Their voices always sounded the same, harmonizing into laughter. He reached for them, and all he got was a handful of balloons. They didn’t float down here.

Paimon shouted, “What’s she doing?”

“Hey, fuck you—”

The world filled up with the sounds of bursting balloons, and Jason thought he went under again, but he was lifted up. Something caught his hand, like a thousand steely strings wrapping around his fingers. He sprawled forward onto the edge of the pool, groping for whoever had caught him, ready to ring Pennywise’s neck if this was another game.

There were no clowns, and no invisible ghosts laughing. There was only the sloshing of the water, and something dripping to his left.

Hair was tangled around his hand, and it writhed free, going back to its owner. It had pulled him out of the drowning. The figure of hair that had been swimming laps paused at the edge of the pool, and inside it, eyes darker than coal bored into him. It was like a power drill to the mind. It stung and was nice at the same time.

He was used to staring. He stared back. It was all he knew how to do to thank her.

The girl and all her hair dove back into the deep end without a word.

That was for the best. Jason had never been good at banter.

Bathroom Monologues Movie Awards 2017

It's almost March 2018, so of course we're all talking about the best movies of 2017. Naturally I disagree with some of the Oscar winners. More naturally, I don't understand what some of the categories mean. But nothing shall dissuade me from telling a democratic body of people who devote swaths of their lives to film that their mass conclusions were wrong. So here we go!

The Robbed Award

Going to the movie that got no play last year

and is just as good as whatever won Best Picture

FENCES

Great Things I Read in July and August, 2017 Edition

I'll miss you, Summer 2017! Fun as it was to see people at so many cons, it's nice to have the weather cool down and be able to stay home for a while. While I can't tell you some of the projects I'm working on yet, I am happy to share some of my favorite free reads from over the last two months. As always, everything here is free to read. Just click the link. If you like what you read, please consider donating to the author's Patreon, or subscribing to the related magazine. So many places are struggling to get it done right now.

Fiction

"Skills To Keep the Devil In His Place" by Lia Swope Mitchell at Shimmer Magazine
-This is somewhere between a possession story and Slipstream. Slipstream usually bends towards the Fantastic, so seeing it wax toward Horror intrigues. Here a girl is going through the typical pains of adolescence - how to bond with people while protecting her psyche, conflict with a mother who seems alternately ambivalent and overbearing. But at the same time, she feels like the Devil himself is sometimes in her eyes, or sitting in her lap, sometimes in disgustingly vivid detail. The story teases us with how this sort of possession will overlap with the person she's turning into simply as a teenager, and whether she'll do right by anyone in her life - her mother, her BFF, or even Satan. The most poignant part is when she's so horrendously bullied at school that the strange demon slithering out from under her bed at night feels like a viable companion. Possession stories don't examine human isolation often enough, but Mitchell gets it.

"Never Yawn Under a Banyan Tree" by Nibetida Sen at Anathema Magazine
-A literally and figuratively spirited story! Dating advice is usually awkward, but especially when it comes from a ghost you accidentally swallowed. Our interloper here is a pret, which fell from a banyan tree and into our narrator's gullet. The pret thinks our narrator could do better than her current romantic prospects, and kicks off a delightful series of events that I don't want to spoil. But I've re-read this story three times over August, just to smile to at certain bits.

Bathroom Monologue: What If Captain America Isn't Alone?

It wasn’t just Captain America who joined Hydra. Was it weird to you that in seventy years of continuity, Cap never mentioned his fascist leanings, and always stopped Hydra from taking over the world?

Then it’s going to be super-weird when Sam Wilson and Sharon Carter join Hydra, too, plus three quarters of the Fantastic Four. Ben Grimm brings an iPod Shuffle and plays smooth jazz just a little too loud during roll call.

The thing is, having all these new recruits doesn’t make Hydra more effective. In fact the number of missions per fiscal quarter drops. Every time they take a vote to raid some young democracy, the measure is voted down in favor of getting drunk and ordering Five Guys. The TEAM HYDRA Facebook Wall is quickly covered in Bernie Sanders quotes and funny cat memes.

X-Men is My Star Wars

Star Wars or Star Trek? My answer is X-Men. Because I grew up with them, I like my SciFi Extra-Special-Implausible. Not growing up with Star Wars, I confess to never “getting it.” When the Prequels landed, I was unfazed. They were just another trilogy about a Mary Sue with his cast of not-as-special-people who were important because he knew them. They weren’t as well made, but they were clearly the same model. Today, the greatest thing about Force Awakens is watching other people get so much out of it.

I told you that to tell you about ADD. In my lifetime ADD became ADHD, then became a "myth," a thing doctors made up for money, or lazy people made up as excuses. The current scorn for its sufferers is garbage. I have it, and have since childhood - the same week I received medication, my grades skyrocketed. Even then I struggled with reading. Superhero comics, with their mixture of art and the written word, were a huge part of introducing me to the desire for literacy. Here, nothing was more invigorating than X-Men comics, and particularly Wolverine.

So half my readers just closed this article because, ugh, another Wolverine fan right?

The rest of you: hold on for four more sentences.

Because he became particularly meaningful to me at Age 13, when medical malpractice put me in full-body pain for the rest of my life. As opposed to Superman’s invincible skin or Batman’s eternal dodging reflexes, Wolverine feels every blow. He’s shot, stabbed, even eviscerated, and the good artists captured that the pain registered on his face. He could survive anything, but only win by powering through the pain.

"Foreign Tongues" is live at Flash Fiction Online!

What if an alien visitor wasn't as reliant on sight and sound as we are, but rather wanted a taste of our culture? Would you mind an alien tasting you? And would you taste polite to them? Those are some of the questions behind my latest story at Flash Fiction Online, "Foreign Tongues," about an alien explorer that finds earth and thinks ice cream is our best ambassador. The humans? Well...

By bizarre coincidence, this is the third story Flash Fiction Online has published from me in an April. The third comedy, too. So the amazing people at Flash Fiction Online put me on the cover. But they didn't just put my name on it or an author photo. No, no. They painted a tribute to "Sun Belt," "Alligators by Twitter," and the latest story.

I couldn't be more tickled by this. I'll have to take their editors out for ice cream. It's what civilized explorers do.

Kryptonite or Bad Writing: What's Superman's Real Weakness?

The more I hear people wishing Batman would take down Superman, the more I believe it comes from a greater hatred of power than of its abuse. The current popular iterations of Batman are of a tyrant building his kingdom, an autocrat ruling Gotham with an iron fist, an angry billionaire of unchecked privilege and brutality. Somehow Superman is the one labeled overpowered and unrelatable.

People keep saying he's invincible and therefore a bad character. But Superman's weakness isn't just Kryptonite. In the biggest comic event of all time, the mofo was straight-up beaten to death in a fist fight.


His weaknesses include magic, mind-control, various diseases, other Kryptonians, and the bajillion other aliens that are just as powerful, or more powerful, but are dicks about it. He's vulnerable to super-sharp weapons, the light of a red sun, pretty much every energy weapon I've ever seen. He can be out-smarted, caught by Green Lantern rings, or Black Lantern rings. And there are always nuclear weapons. If he has a greatest weakness, it's probably the emergencies of normal people who he constantly puts his own life on hold to assist. That's why I like him better than Batman. Increasingly, Batman is a fantasy of punishing someone, where Superman is a fantasy of helping someone.

Crediting the Idea Factory

Last night I was doubting my imagination. I'd just finished a new short story, which was the conclusion of a premise I came up with fifteen years ago. My last three short stories were ideas I'd had for decades. Weary from pain, I worried the only ideas I had left these days were the creations of my younger self.

In my malaise, I started backing up my computer so I could rebuild it this weekend. My writing folder was full of unfinished drafts that I had to open to recognize. They were tens of thousands of words of plots, many I'd created in the last couple months but had been so busy I'd forgotten I'd written.

The idea factory was still open. It just wasn't getting credit.

Bathroom Monologues Movie Awards 2015

It's almost March 2016, so of course we're all talking about the best movies of 2015. If all the griping on Twitter is any indication, I'm once again happy to have skipped the Academy Awards. Naturally I disagree with some of the winners. More naturally, I don't understand what some of the categories mean. But nothing shall dissuade me from telling a sizable democratic body of people who devote swaths of their lives to film that their mass conclusions were wrong. Here we go.

Most Anticipated Books (and other things) for 2016

Hello, January! What a nice year you've brought behind you. Today I want to share the books I'm most looking forward to this year. Like every year there will be huge surprises, but there's already outrageous promise for what we can read. I've added a couple of games and movies to the end, because anticipation isn't reserved just for writing. But damned if I won't be unreachable the week Children of Earth and Sky releases.

The Drowning Eyes by Emily Foster
(Right Now, Tor.com)

The first book on my list is actually releasing this week! One of Tor.com's hot novellas, The Drowning Eyes is a tale of the high seas, and the people that control the wind behind your sails. Wind mages are a great idea for pirate stories. Their power stopped raiders for years, but that magic has been stolen, forcing an intrepid captain to risk her ship and crew to get it back.

Top Ten Videogames of the Year, 2015

Nothing expresses how Three-Stooges-goofy I find ranking art than my own attempts to do so. After Twitter friends said they wanted to read about my Top Ten Games of the Year, I tried and failed to order them. In recent years I've tried keeping lists like this just to remind myself how great videogames are as a hobby, and every year I come up with impossible ties. 2015 was the year of the most goofy ties yet.

Below you'll find:
-A tie between Tenth, Ninth, Eighth, Seventh, and Sixth Place.
-A tie between Fifth and Fourth Place.

-A tie between Third and Second Place.
-And a game that's unlike any of the other nine, and yet I think is my favorite thing I've played this decade.

There is no objective superiority between any of the tied games. Hell, there isn't even a respectable objectivity in the games ranked above and below each other, because it turns out comparing art objectively is ridiculous. Ask me what I think of Awards Culture sometime for a fun rant.

Aside from revealing how goofy ranked lists are, this is my attempt to celebrate 2015 as a year where so many companies created such different pieces of great interactive entertainment. These were necessary escapes from some terrible health problems, and some enriching narratives that gave me great times with friends. The leaps videogames have made in narrative, in the ability to present art design, and in refining mechanics makes it one of my favorite respites. It's so great that I end the list with a bunch of Honorable Mentions. The Honorable Mentions are not ranked because Shut The Hell Up.

#BestReads2015 Is Coming

It's December, which means it's Best Reads time. This is an annual event for bloggers asking what your favorite books were of the last year. BestReads2015 launches Monday, December 28th. That gets it out of the way of Christmas, and gives you a couple more weeks to finish your reading. I know I have five books I really want to polish off before I give up on 2015.

As opposed to Best of the Year lists, this can include any books you read for the first time this year. It includes anything from 2014 you only caught onto now (I presume The Martian will hit a few lists), as well as classics. As someone who's always catching up on older works, my list will probably be half things published over a decade ago. The Color Purple is fricking good.

The tradition is to list your favorite books of the year and write a little about them. You can list as many and write as much about each as you like - there is no mandated standard. A Dirty Dozen or a Top Three? Both work. If you post, let me know and I'll add your link to my post on the 28th. The easiest way is in the comments of one of these posts.

So think on it. What are your favorite books that you read this year? Not what was written or published in 2015, but that you personally read and loved for the first time. Fiction, non-fiction, prose, poetry and sequential art are all welcome. You can handle the number and format as you like.

On Twitter, our hashtag will be #BestReads2015. Feel free to launch questions below. We'll field them together.

Giving Thanks for Blood Banks and Balloon Malfunctions

I went on a little Twitter rant Thursday morning. It was a positive rant, which is unusual because rants are not usually positive - nor are tweets. It felt weird seeing my string of gratitude filter between people griping or giving half-hearted thanks for tiny things in their lives. Often I'm like that, because you get caught up in your own norms and anxieties. 

But if you have the privilege of internet access, something that would have passed for magic in any time before that of our grandparents, you can be thankful for more than toast. Sometimes it's useful to remember that. So here comes an obnoxious barrage of things I'm glad are real.

For instance, I'm thankful for the crossovers cosplay affords.

Your Daredevil Fanfic Minute

Foggy: No no no no no.

Matt: What's the matter, Foggy?

Foggy: I just realized this guy is going to kill one of us and you're the main character.

Matt: You're the plucky comic relief.

Foggy: In a Marvel thing.

Matt: They wouldn't.

Foggy: MATT HE LOOKS LIKE JOSS WHEDON

Short Story Publications, and a Bonus!

If only all my posts could have this much good news. The editors at Podcastle just produced their latest episode, which includes an audio version of my short story, "Wet." You can listen to it for free right here.

"Wet" follows the unusual friendship between an immortal and a ghost stranded in Arizona. This is a reprint of a 2014 story of mine, originally appearing in Urban Fantasy Magazine.

Daily Science Fiction has also posted its Table of Contents for October, and I have a brand new story appearing for them on October 27th. "The Terrible" is about a supervillain who takes his heroine for granted. It's my tribute to Wonder Woman.

And just before Halloween, SF Signal will be running a Mind Meld on children's movies that terrified us. I'll be contributing, but if you want to know what beloved classic scared the crap out of me for an entire decade, you'll have to click back over in two weeks.

Last but not least, I've also been invited to a panel at Saratoga's World Fantasy Convention. I'll be joining expert authors for an hour of Monsters as Devourers - figuring out what human-eating  monsters have always wanted out of us.

Let's celebrate by shipping Jason and Sadako, by artist Bryan Lee. 'tis the season.

 

Eleven Horror Stories with Happy Endings (Obviously, SPOILERS)

The other night, a friend of mine said I should've expected SOMA ending grimly because "it's Horror." It bugs me when people talk like that, because Horror doesn't have to end badly. It's actually dangerous to the genre if the endings are predictable. That's why the best Twilight Zone episodes challenge our expectations.

I've written before about not particularly liking either Happy or Sad endings. Sometimes an ending fits a particular story, and often Happiness is a surprisingly good fit for Horror. They're natural compliments to each other: go through the tumult of a scary story for the relief of an ending. It reminds me of Jack McDevitt once yelling at a WorldCon, "I'm not reading five hundred pages just to read the hero died at the end!"

Yet I love Horror, which feels more inclined every decade to end with everyone dead, or at best, doomed. So join me for a few scary movies that end well for the heroes. Maybe we'll learn something.

I'll even start with the most obvious entry so that if you've clicked here by accident, you'll only have the end of a hundred-year-old novel spoiled.

1. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897)

Not Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, which has a runtime more decadent than its costume design. But the formative vampire story for generations had the good guys triumph. It's an old-fashioned monster story: we find a monster, it scares us, and then we win. Life expectancy was lower in 1897, so endings went easier on us.

But seriously, read that ending. The evil sisters go down, Quincey and Harker shank Dracula, and Mina and Jonathan have a baby and live happily ever after. Stoker originally made their victory so overwhelming that Dracula's own castle died and fell apart.

Ultimately, Stoker decided killing the evil real estate was too much.

Life Finds a Way: Jurassic Park's Obsession With Bad Parents (Spoilers for the series)

Jurassic Park is a series about absent parents. The dinosaurs are mostly clones - they were created from mishmashes of frogs and mosquito guts. They're built as living entertainment products, and raised to obey in cages. Subconsciously you know all this, and it's part of why you root for them to eat people so many times. But they aren't the only parentless children in this universe.

Consider Jurassic World's most obligatory characters: the kids. Zach and Gray Mitchell are tourists, put upon to survive, with minimal contribution to problem solving. They are a checklist of child tropes, and one obvious check item is their parents' divorce. The Mitchells sent them to the park to have one last positive memory before their impending split. Zach and Gray know it's coming, and it brings the younger to tears. The people that gave them life and are supposed to raise them won't stick it out. The older brother reflects that at least he'll be out to college in a couple years. These kids don't even expect to rely on their parents.

It's no accident that the dino-obsessed kid is named "Gray," while the lead raptor is "Blue." They're the lead colors of the logo, most of the promotional posters, and the color filters over the film. They are the opposite sides of Jurassic World's obsession with children of questionable parents.