Two-and-a-half weeks out there on the road sharing the gospel good word of demons, demons everywhere with readers, and I gotta tell you, it was both a very exciting and also incredibly wearying tour.
The exciting: I mean, every event was legit great, with tons of cool readers coming out. I visited excellent bookstores. I got to chat with delightful writing partners. I saw friends new and old! I recognized a few people from their avatars online, which is rare, because frequently at events I’m so mentally overwhelmed by stimulus that I might not even recognize people I know quite well. (“And you are?” “I’m your mother.” “I’m pretty sure you died seven years ago.” *undead wail*). I ate heirloom apples from a killer Wisconsin orchard. Oh, and I went to the Minnesota State Fair, thanks to pals Bill Childs and Stacy Schwartz. What a hoot! A greasy, sugary, foodie hoot!
(Some photos below.)
On the other hand, there was the wearying.
Because when I wasn’t doing all the cool things?
I was doing the uncool things. Which mostly consisted of:
a) driving
b) existing in a hotel room
c) driving more, or being driven
d) hurriedly eating middling food where I had to be careful not to ingest diarrhea lettuce or salmonella cilantro or shrimp made of fiberglass or whatever the newest thing is that RFK Jr is out there licking
e) sleeping
(oh, there was alsothe part where I did get a gut-bug in Minneapolis, which caused me to miss my Denver event, very sorry Rocky Mountain People, I do love you and hope to see you again someday)
I mean, no, it wasn’t all that way, but it was more that than I wanted it to be — part of it, I think, was down to the choice to drive the tour and also have the tour be largely through the Midwest, which isn’t always the most exciting drive. The drives tend to be long and most highway driving anyway is very good at sort of sanding down all the interesting characteristics of a location and letting it just be “asphalt plus maybe some trees here and there.”
(That said, I think the drive through Wisconsin is actually quite lovely. Wisconsin, you and Minnesota are great states. Don’t let anybody give you any shit.)
So those between-times, which were the dominant times, I often felt quite — I don’t know. Lonely? Unmoored from the universe? Internally greige? It wasn’t great. Again, I dunno if it’s just the era, or my age, or the nature and shape of how I transited from place to place. But it’s fine now. I only decapitated three hitchhikers. Which is good for me! It’s good! I deserve a cookie now.
Let’s see, what else is going on?
Website got hacked while I was on the road, so that was annoying.
I met a Venezuelan Lyft driver who was very angry about “the Muslims” and how they weren’t “real Americans.”
I did eat a bunch of heirloom apples, and I will be posting reviews of them here.
At the fair I ate something called an Apple Donut Ham Grinder, which was also my stripper name back in the early-2000s.
I turned into an ambulatory column of human sweat at the (truly delightful) Belmont Lit Fest just outside Charlotte, NC.
So, yeah.
Thanks to all my most excellent chat partners out there on the road: Todd Keisling, Tracy Townsend, Richard Kadrey, ML Rio, Nat Cassidy, Clay McLeod Chapman, Sarah Read, Eric Asher, JH Markert, and I’m sorry for missing Benjamin Percy and Erika Wurth! Good times and hope to see y’all again real soon.
I remind folks that I’ve still got a little life left in this tour come October —
I’m no longer attending NYCC (some family stuff nudged into the way), but —
10/13 is Gibson’s in NH with BFF Delilah Dawson, who releases her phenomenal Monstera that day.
10/14 is both of us at Phoenix Books in Burlington, Vermont.
Then I’m off to Canada — Can*Con that weekend.
Finally, 10/20 takes me to Oblong Books with Sam Rebelein!
Cool? Cool.
Now: The Calamities.
It’s out. It’s… I guess doing its thing? I have no idea. I hope people are picking it up and enjoying it. If you are, I do hope you’ll tell your friends, your family, your rogue’s gallery of supervillains that follows you around and interrupts your daily tasks. I also hope you’ll be so kind as to leave a review somewhere online, because that helps.
Booklist reviewed it recently, saying: “Meet Mourning Mayne: eventual inheritor of great, almost unfathomable wealth, who’s not entirely sure he wants it all. Struggling to forge a life apart from his powerful family, he’s forced to return home at a summons from his father, which is impossible to ignore. He’s forced to decide, finally, whether he wants to rejoin the family or turn his back on it forever. At its heart a story about the allure and terror of absolute power and the struggle to retain individuality within a family, The Calamities is Wendig at his very best: a horror story with elements of dark fantasy. Billed as the first book in a new series, The Fiends, which gives you a pretty good idea about where the author is going with his story, this novel features a host of otherworldly characters and the kind of detailed world building that makes Wendig’s novels such a tactile experience for his readers. A great start to what should be a spectacular series.”
I know! I know. I’m being very annoying with all this “book promo” stuff, but hey, I got a book out, and if I don’t promo it, they pull a lever and I fall into a glass tube full of coked-up piranha.
“These questions hang over the whole book like smoke, and they infuse The Calamities with even more compelling layers. This is a sharp, witty, absorbing novel from one of our finest genre writers, and it moves like a bat out of Hell.”
And if you’re able to leave a review somewhere, please do! Especially if you liked the book. If you didn’t like it, that’s okay, too — you can deposit your review into the mouth of the old goat skull just off Route 73. That’s Carl, and Carl will take your negative review to the appropriate locations.
ANYWAY. Hey, first week of The Calamities is done-zo fun-zo, and I think it went pretty great? Had a blast at Thrillerdelphia with ML Rio, The Twisted Spine with Nat Cassidy, and then culminated all of it in the glorious madness that is DARK INK at the Doylestown Bookshop, whereupon Clay McLeod Chapman (check out Devil Inside, dangit) and I became the DEMONBOIZ and, I dunno, traded souls or wrestled demons or something. It’s a bit of a blur. Met so many great readers new and old. Feel very fortunate. I’ll pop some photos at the end of the post for you to stare at in wonder and/or horror.
So, now it’s on to the second and third week of the tour, where I actually leave home and am out yonder on the road for the whole time — which is to say, I’m stitching my way toward the Midwest and then back again:
Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago (Naperville), Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis, Denver, St. Louis, and finally, Charlotte (Belmont Lit Fest).
Hopefully, some of you are coming out to see me at some of these events, and if you are, I have decided to provide a list of VITAL RULES should you be willing to come regard my corporeal form and witness my flesh-covered face in public! Do not betray these rules, lest the DEMON FOLK grow surly.
1.) Yes, I will sign your books. I will personalize them, even, however you want. Sometimes a reader will be like, “whatever you prefer,” and I don’t prefer anything, because it’s not my book. It’s your book! I will mutilate it in whatever way you most prefer!
2.) Yes, I will sign books from home, though different bookstores may have different rules as to how many you can bring, but in my experience if you’re buying first from the store and the event isn’t hundreds of people, then we can sign whatever you got in a friendly and expedient manner, I’m sure.
3.) Yes, I have signed things that are not books. Bags and shirts and Kindle covers and all kinds of stuff. I have signed various parts of people’s bodies, though it’s been a while. I signed a baby once! My only ask is, if you have that kind of special request and it requires a special marker, you gotta bring me that marker.
4.) Yes, I will take a photo with you! I mean, you should take the photo, or someone in line or at the store, because you probably don’t want to be in my photo roll. My photo roll is a cursed place and if I am allowed to take a photo of you, I may capture your soul, and then I own it. Sorry.
5.) Yes, I do accept hugs. Moreso from people I kinda know, but hey, you want a hug, we can make that happen, just ask. That’s on you to engage, of course. I’m not just gonna run around the room giving out unasked-for huggery. I am no hug thug. I’m a civilized fella.
6.) No, I generally don’t accept gifts of homemade food. I want to. I appreciate the effort. But like, it’s weird out there, and I dunno what you put in that muffin. It might be ketamine, or centipede eggs. Honestly, maybe you don’t even know what’s in the muffin. Popsicles have glass now. Lettuce is covered in xenomorph spores. Pretty sure that Captain Crunch is peppered with RFK Jr’s ossified Zyn packets. Food is crazy out there.
7.) Yes, I will accept packaged food gifts, especially if they are APPLE SNACK GANG certified, which is to say, are apple snacks of some ilk. I will also accept apples. Which I guess you could’ve poisoned. But I dunno, we all dance with the devils we choose to dance with, I guess.
8.) No, I do not accept gifts of booze. I want to! But while part of this tour is driving, the rest is flying, and TSA gets weird about water bottles — pretty sure a full jug of gin ain’t gonna get through.
9.) No, I generally don’t accept gift copies of books you have written. I want to. And I do sometimes if circumstances are right (we know each other, I’m not in the midst of traveling, you aren’t weird about it). You wrote a book and should be proud and I am proud of you. But traveling usually means having weight limits — I’m a CARRY-ON kinda guy (also a CARRION kinda guy, but that’s different), and I have limited space and am already bringing a book or two with me. So, I deeply want to take your book with me but probably can’t! I’m still proud of you, though. Books are tough. Good on you.
10.) No, I probably won’t be able to go out with you and get food or drink or whatever. Even if I know you! You can ask, for sure, but my timing for book tour is basically: I roll up to a hotel at check-in time, I scrub the ROAD BARNACLES from my body, I ideally find some kind of nourishment to cram into my nourishment hole, and then I try to find my way to a bookstore in advance of the event. After the event, maybe I’m up for something, but as I am an introvert-faking-extroversion, I am often ready for the PEOPLE-FREE CRASH my brain demands, and then I must flee into the night, like Batman, or Dracula.
11.) Yes, you can ask me questions either in the Q&A or in the signing line. I love questions! I will A your Qs all night long. Which sounds weirder than I meant it to.
12.) Yes, I absolutely sign backlist — books other than The Calamities are more than welcome. They’re all my weird horrible horror babies.
I think that’s a good start!
I hope you’ll come out. Support the bookstores. Tell a friend about the book. Bring a friend to the event. And mirth will be had.
And now, some quick photos, not all mine (and the amazing art is from Matt Durante)–
The Calamities (Book One of The Fiends) is now out, rampaging through the populace, gamboling about, claws at the ready, teeth sharp, and its countless eyes fixed upon you. So, I do hope you’ll check it out!
But, hey, if you’re still a little on the fence, well, let’s see if we can push you off it onto the dark side of the meadow.
Here is the book jacket description:
Mourning Mayne knows he’ll one day bear the duty of managing his family’s vast empire of wealth and power. But the feckless Mourning has always struggled to accept this legacy of cruelty, domination, and exploitation . . . and something even darker.
Because the Maynes are no ordinary family: Hidden in our world are the fiends—half-human, half-demon, and possessed of a dark magic born from buying human souls—and the Maynes are one of the oldest and most influential fiendish families.
But when Mourning’s estranged father, the formidable and terrifying Hadrian Mayne, demands that Mourning return to the fold, he has to decide whether to accept his legacy and embrace his role in the family or to forge his own destiny, and with it, change the course of the world.
Because along the way home, he will meet Key, a black-market seller of human souls, and Quinn, an artist who may hold the dark truth behind the fate of the fiends. Alone, they have all struggled with the darkness of their natures . . . but together, they might find a path out of the shadows.
Here’s some nice things people have said about it:
“Vivid, unsettling, and darkly compelling, The Calamities is Chuck Wendig at his best.” — #1 New York Times bestselling author Veronica Roth
“The Calamities is a twisting, winding river of darkness—part ink-black Gothic tale, part brutal family saga, and housed in a demonic nesting doll of a dark fantasy novel. Taken as a whole, it reminds me yet again of Wendig’s wildly lethal range and versatility when it comes to horror. The guy is, simply put, unstoppable.” — Keith Rosson, author of Coffin Moon
“The most terrifying thing about these demons is how human they are. The Calamities is a delightfully brutal and inventive take on demonology from the blast furnace of Wendig’s imagination. A gore-stained epic.” — Chris Panatier, author of Daytide and Worry Box
“A massively ambitious, classic horror free-for-all that’s macabre, smart, and FUN.” — Sarah Langan, author of Good Neighbors and Trad Wife
“My favorite thing about reading Chuck Wendig is never knowing which Wendig we’re going to get. If you’ve followed Chuck’s work for a while, you know what I mean. There’s terrifying-tech Wendig and urban fantasy Wendig, there’s fantasy Wendig, folk horror Wendig, epic horror Wendig… but with all of that, I still didn’t see The Calamities coming. Chuck calls it horror/fantasy, and it’s that, for sure. He lists a lot of writer influences in the acknowledgements at the end of the book, but I want to talk about only one: Clive Barker.” — Christopher Golden, author of Carry Me To My Grave
Bisexual half-demon fuck-ups go on a world-ending nightmare adventure!
A longer pitch:
“Some say we run the world. To them I say: No, we do not run the world. We don’t have to! We simply own the souls of the people who do.” —Aurelius Mayne
The true currency of the world is this: the human soul. The fiends — those who claim the blood of ancient, demonic beings — know this all too well, as the ones who bargain for those very souls, and use the distillate of those souls for a variety of mundane-to-grotesquely-nefarious purpose. The fiends in their blooded broods see nothing wrong with this: this is their way. It always has been. They’re not stealing the souls. The humans have their choice to bargain them away if they so choose — and many do, in fact, choose exactly that. They sell their souls for money, love, revenge, property, power.
You know, the classics.
Problem is, those so driven to forfeit their souls are increasingly bereft of the things that makes a soul enticing: character, conscience, a code of ethics. And those who forfeit their souls often do so to be put in places or positions of power. Which sort of explains the state of the world a little bit, doesn’t it?
When the world is run by soulless people, and those people are in turn controlled by ancient demon families, it leaves the world vulnerable. Like termites have chewed through the spiritual fundament — the global soul, torn to tatters. And when such holes are chewed through the world, well…
Sometimes, things can crawl through.
A tower has risen. A strange fluctuating structure — sometimes a ziggurat, a lighthouse, a ratio antenna, a tenement. It has begun its dread broadcast. It wants something and offers something in return.
And it is our characters who are first to answer.
Mourning Mayne: fuckboy of the Mayne family, exiled heir to the big chair of Agares House. Doesn’t want to be involved! Wants to return to his blissed-out hedonistic lifestyle — but has been drawn into conspiracy and, dare I say it, calamity. He is heartstruck and woefully unprepared.
Key Simone: sober-living snapper-upper of human souls, haunted by the mistakes of her past, keeping her head down and an eye toward the exit — only problem is, her keepers in The Dantalion want her in the game.
Quinn: an out-of-work artist in Philadelphia and an unawakened fiend, they seem to be the one receiving the strongest broadcast from the tower they call the Configuration, which makes them very valuable, indeed — they possess untold, unrealized power and are unknowingly at the center of everything.
Silas Borne: oh, don’t worry about him, it’s probably fine, sure, sure, he used to be called The Cleaver, and was a serial killer, but don’t worry, he’s since been supernaturally gelded and now he’s sweet as pie and won’t hurt a fly and he’s just been sent here by his keepers to find out what’s really going on, he craves an adventure and seriously, it’s fine, it’s FINE
*coughs into hand*
Needless to say, things go very, very wrong.
Why read the book?
Five quick reasons —
First, it’s very pretty. I mean, seriously, look at it.
Second, demons are fucking cool and weird.
Third, you love me, and wish to PLEASE ME okay this probably isn’t a very good or realistic reason but, I dunno, just in case you’re a member of whatever cult I’m currently secretly running shhhh.
Fourth, you like horror but you also like fantasy and you were like, what if horror and fantasy had weird sex and made a demon baby??? Oh also the book totally has a horrible demon baby in it, too. His name is Orcobas! He’s terrible!
Fifth, it’s a big-ass book — this is no mere appetizer, this is a seven-course demon-dinner, baby. Ye shall be feasting upon these souls for a long while.
Why did I write the book?
I cover that somewhat in the acknowledgments of the book, but I’ll say here: I am really very proud of The Staircase in the Woods, but that book was me getting out a knife and cutting into parts of myself (metaphorically! relax!) and then scraping that stuff across the page with the blade. It was a raw, rough bit of emotional surgery at times, and I craved something that was — well, I don’t want to say lighter, because I’d argue this book is at times quite a good bit darker. But I wanted to write something more fun. Fun to write and ultimately fun to read. Just fucked-up nightmare characters — the best of the worst people — going on adventures across a playground of horror.
Does it connect to your other books?
It does! Not in a way that requires you read those. But for those who have been following the books closely — you’ll definitely recognize some faces in here (one of them belonging to a certain orange cat), and you’ll also find that I’ve definitely been building to something. So hopefully that’s fun, too.
Is this a standalone?
It is not! I mean, unless you want it to be. Any book is a standalone if you choose to only read that book. But! It is currently the first of a duology — the second book being Chaos Reigns, which should come out in… uhh, I dunno! We don’t have a date. I’m writing it now. Halfway through. It’s fun! And horrific! In hopefully the very best worst ways.
You know, I don’t have any, but I find that Storygraph is a great place where people crowdsource content warnings. If you don’t want to do that, just safely assume that this is a horror-fantasy featuring considerable bouts of depravity! Assume triggers, ahoy.
Where is the best place to buy it from, and in what format?
The best place and format is the one you prefer. Full stop.
Now — that said?
Indie bookstores are just such a great choice. No, not every indie bookstore is a magical fairyland of good people, but honestly, a lot are. They’re full of bonafide book wizards, those places, and are further run by locals in your community.
So, that would be my choice. And you can also buy it from indie audio or e-book merchants, too, like Libro.fm or Bookshop.org.
What if I can’t buy it?
That’s okay! Libraries exist, and are awesome. If your library does not carry it, you can always ask them to buy a copy. They are likely to listen because libraries are cool like that.
Otherwise, it’s — you know, read the book, tell people about it, leave a review somewhere, buy ten copies and leave them in various stumps and cubbyholes, form a cult around it, summon a demon and trap it in an incantation bowl whereupon you force it to make the book a bestseller. The usual.
HahahahahahahahahahahahahahAaAAAAAAHHHHH no I jolly well did not. Didn’t use it to write it, to edit it, to research it, to get ideas for it. I did not use AI in any part of the ideation or creation of this book and nor did (to my knowledge) my publisher. I fucking hate gen-AI. It sucks. It stole my shit and is fucking up the world and making everything somehow even less trustworthy than it was before. Yes, I use emdashes. No, that’s not a sign of AI use. Because AI stole those emdashes from us, goddamnit. I’d summon a literal demon before I used AI.
Wait does that mean you used demons to write this book??
I plead the fifth
*slams door*
Any final thoughts?
I don’t know why I turned this into an “interview / FAQ” thing, but here we are. The mind wanders! The fingers type!
So, this book is, I thiiiiiink, my 34th novel?
And it doesn’t get easier. I don’t mean that as a negative, necessarily — I actually like that each book is its own mad animal that must be tamed in its own special way. I think if this thing got easier it might be less satisfying to write a book, and more worrisome, it might diminish the quality of the books. It feels valuable to have it be difficult and tricky and ever-shifting, because then you don’t get complacent as a writer. You don’t get too comfortable. Creatively speaking, at least.
That said, I still don’t love release days. They feel alien and isolating — sure, some books get like, midnight releases and shit, but for the most part, the machine just does what the machine does. The book has gone through its many mutations and mutilations — I wrote it, we edited it, the publisher designed it, and now printed it — and now it’s on bookstore and library shelves. It appears, as if by magic, but it’s a magic I don’t control and I don’t even necessarily see. (Which is why it’s nice when people post things about the book on a launch day, btw. And why we authors really appreciate that.) So much is put on a book’s launch week, but really, a book’s sales are frequently and even ideally in the long tail — a build-up where people talk about it and buy it over time. But backlist has its own tricky issues, of course, which is really not for this post.
Still! There is cool energy in a release day, I’m just not always privy to it. Which is one of the nice things about doing events (again: ahem ahem COME SEE ME ON TOUR) is I get to meet readers and fans and friends and probably a couple of secret demons. That’s an energy I can feel, and it’s always nice, so thanks to everybody who plans on coming out and seeing me and the various cool writery people I’m chatting with along the way.
Point is —
The book is out and I’m very happy with it and I hope you’ll check it out.
In one week, the demons are free! The Calamities hits shelves next Tuesday, 8/18, and let me just be the first to say: AHHHHH.
And, in addition: AHHHHHH.
It’s very exciting to have this story on the precipice of emerging from its long dark cosmic prison — this is the first of two parts, the second being Chaos Reigns, and it was a great deal of fun to write. It’s also a bit of a gear shift. It’s still something that is, for me, absolute horror, but it’s also thrust through with a spear of strange, mad fantasy. A little bit of Barker, a bit of Mount Char, but (hopefully) still feels uniquely like a book only I could’ve written.
And with that in mind, I also note that it’s a book that draws in threads from a number of my other books — Book of Accidents, Black River Orchard, Staircase in the Woods, and even (gasp) The Blue Blazes. None are required to read or understand this, obviously, but for those who have, then hopefully ye shall be rewarded.
It’s a big book!
It’s full of nasty people! (Who I also sorta love, just the same.)
Bad, bisexual half-demons go to save and also maybe ruin the world? The best of the worst people go on an adventure? Nightmare ensues? Hell yeah.
Philly! NYC! Doylestown! Harrisburg! Pittsburgh! Cincinnati! Chicago area! Milwaukee! Madison! Minneapolis! Denver! St. Louis! Charlotte area for the Belmont Litfest! And I get to talk to some amazing people — Richard Kadrey, Benjamin Percy, Tracy Townsend, Sarah Read, Erika Wurth, Nat Cassidy, Clay McLeod Chapman, Todd Keisling, JH Markert, ML Motherfucking Rio! Plus all the authors of Dark Ink, and Belmont LitFest.
It’s gonna be a hoot.
So I hope you’ll go. All the tour details here. Note that many of the stores require either RSVPs or tickets. (Tickets usually get you entry plus the book.) It’s good to support indie bookstores — you can also, if you can’t make it, order from the store, I’ll sign it, and then you can pick it up. (Some stores even ship. My own local, Doylestown Bookshop, does, if you want a copy from them.) But you should still try to go because we’ll have fun. We’ll talk weird apples. We can talk about creepy staircases that don’t belong. We can definitely talk about my favorite demons.
All right. I’ll be back next week to properly yell at you about the release. Thanks for sticking with me. Thanks for checking out the book. Thanks for telling all your friends and family that if they don’t check out the book you’ll never talk to them again. Thanks for sacrificing relentlessly on the altar, thus earning favor from the fiends who are trapped inside the book. Also fuck AI.
[Editing here to note that the HWA has removed this board member as of this afternoon. I’ll post the full text of that in the comments below.]
Today I, and every other HWA member, received the HWA newsletter in our inboxes. In that newsletter was an essay (“essay”) of pro-AI propaganda that made a number of specious points in an effort to, I guess, get us all to stop judging those who might use AI in their writing work and careers.
This is, of course, incredibly disappointing to see. This is a professional writer’s organization. It is the Horror Writer’s Association, not the Horror Prompter’s Association. A writer’s organization should be geared toward the act, the art, the craft, and the business of writing, not slop-wrangling and prompt-engineering using the shitty sparkling autocorrect of LLMs. It is grotesque to have pro-AI (“AI”) propaganda sent to us, the people whose necks are first under the boots of the AI companies. We are the people that have had all our work stolen immorally and illegally. We’re the ones turned into Soylent Green, so it’s a little fucking rude to have an essay piped hot and fresh into our inboxes that dares to be mad at us for criticizing anyone who eats Soylent Green. We’re getting cannibalized, turned into sausages, and you’re mad that we’re mad about it.
And when I say “you’re” mad, I don’t necessarily assume this is the Official Word of the HWA — already I’m seeing the rumbles that it most certainly is not, that they’re looking for ways to correct this. But the damage is done. The author, Sèphera Girón, is a trustee of the HWA, and saw fit to write what reads ultimately like an ill-thought-out tantrum and not a well-reasoned (if still disagreeable) pro-AI message. And so, regardless of how official this is, or isn’t, it’s disappointing that it ever made it out the door in the first place.
The “essay” is not something posted online, but you can find it online. One spot is here, on Bluesky, posted by author Holly Lyn Walrath.
On the one hand I don’t even know if the essay is worth legitimizing by taking it to task. On the other hand, it seems that its POV isn’t even “wow, AI is so great,” and more “wow, stop being mean about AI.” It attempts to take to task so-called “gatekeepers” and “bullies.”
So, I’m just going to go ahead and take some of the pieces from this essay and talk about how I feel these things are, at best, misguided, and at worst, poisonous notions about how stories are told and art is made.
“Technology keeps changing, oh-so-rapidly these days. We went from screaming about having to pump our own gas to screaming about self-checkouts. Back in the day, film studios were upset at the invention of home television sets, musicians were upset about electric guitars and synthesizers, filmmakers were upset about YouTube, visual artists were upset about photography, photographers were upset about Photoshop, and now writers are screaming about AI.”
I don’t know that pumping gas and self check-outs are relevant technological innovations here, but okay. But talking about film vs TV, electric instruments, photography, and so forth, leads into an argument that pro-AI (“AI” — again, we’re talking LLMs and what Tobias Buckell calls LIMs, Large Image Models) really like to use a lot, which is, “You stupid Luddite, you’re just afraid of the new technology.” And then sometimes they say something about horse-and-buggy versus the car, or some other false equivalency.
The reason all of this is false equivalency is that prompting your way to art or to writing is not the same as having a new tool that allows you to make art or tell a story. AI, here, is not a tool —
It’s not allowing you to do the work. You’re allowing it to do the work. Which is to say, you’re the tool.
The AI makes decisions. (Not literally. AI isn’t smart. It knows nothing. But programmatically, it takes pathways based on the chaos of its code.) You don’t make the decisions. You may guide them. But you don’t make them.
Look at it this way — if I have a camera, and I want to take a photo of a butterfly, I can do that. I can grab my camera. I can find a butterfly. I can track it, trying not to startle it, I can choose how to frame the shot in the chaos of that moment, I can choose how close I’m zoomed in, I can take one photo or a hundred. Then I can take the photos that I chose to take and do more work — cropping, adding contrast, modifying sharpness, whatever. Or I can take the photo and then choose to paint it, instead, using it as reference. Whatever. I have a lot of choices there, and they are choices born of the effort — and that multiply with greater effort — that I made out in the field.
But AI isn’t any of that.
AI is, metaphorically, me handing the camera to a robot and saying, “Go get me a photo of a butterfly.”
And then it brings one back. Maybe it’s what I wanted. Maybe it isn’t. But I didn’t make any choices except to fetch a digital errand boy to go make art for me.
“Meanwhile, the invisible oligarchs who control everyone are having a field day. Everyone is falling into their traps.
The real enemy isn’t your buddy who is using AI to make a book cover; the enemy is the Powers-That-Be who thrive on dividing everyone, especially in the United States. Look at how divided everyone in the US got over politics over the past ten years, and it’s now trickled to other countries. No more, are you a fellow human? Nope, it’s who did you vote for? Well, then you must be a hateful asshole. Instant block.“
I recognize here a snippet of truth that we should be aiming our cannons at the giant companies and oligarchs who are fucking everything up and not individuals — that’s entirely fair. At the same time, that doesn’t mean going to bat for the oligarchs. Sure, there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism — but there’s also ways to not gleefully be unethical. There’s “I reluctantly have to drive to work every day, which uses fuel and harms the environment” versus, “I get my Ford F-One-Fuck-You and I roll coal and drive aggressively and vomit fumes everywhere because I don’t give a shit, you woke beta.”
Thing is, even that metaphor kinda sucks — because in most parts of this country, driving a gas vehicle is still often a grim necessity. But using AI to write or make art? Is not. It just isn’t. You can write stories and make art without it. You could eschew its use last month, last year, ten years ago, a hundred, a thousand. It’s absolutely non-essential. (I’ve never used it.)
And since she wants to bring up politics —
I mean, yeah, if you voted for the hateful asshole — and have not yet had a Come To Jesus moment about that vote and that support — and I’m gonna wonder if maybe you’re a hateful asshole, too. It’s like, if someone kicks a puppy and you clap, no, I don’t automatically assume you’re a puppy-kicker, but I sure don’t think you’re someone I’ll hire as a pet-sitter, you feel me?
“The past few weeks have been so tedious with all the gatekeepers out in full force. They are whipping people up into a frenzy, and more division is happening when it comes to AI. Of course, the irony is that the gatekeepers are denouncing AI, yet they are doing it on Facebook, which uses AI. They are likely typing their pretentious screeds on their phones, which also use AI. They likely sell their books on Amazon, which also uses AI.”
Again, a deeply strained logic here. Choosing to use AI in your work is a choice different than simply existing in a world where it is being used around you and by some of the services. And honestly, most of the people who are on Facebook or who have books on Amazon are still doing their best to never use AI. They turn it off when they are able to do so. They avoid its use. They hate when they see it.
“Oh, but Sèphera, there are different levels of AI use, and some are OKAY, but some ARE NOT.”
I mean, yeah? Isn’t that life? Everything is on some kind of spectrum, and sometimes that spectra is, in fact, in an increasing gradient of “enh” to “demonically terrible.” We’re all making choices out here however we can. AI that finds cancer or gets me to the mall faster is different than the one that stole my work and shits it back out when prompted.
“Are you watching TV? Are you using Alexa? Do you have home security? What kind of car do you drive? Do you go to the doctor? Do you watch TV? Do you go to the movies? Do you have shopping apps on your phone?”
What?
What does this even mean?
Am I participating in society, you mean? I’m not new here. Yes, we’re all doing these things all the time. This is very shallow and quite silly. “DO YOU BREATHE AIR? DO YOU USE THE TOILET? ARE YOU CLAD IN FLESH AND ACKNOWLEDGE CORPOREAL REALITY? AH! THEN YOU EXIST IN THE SAME PLANE OF EXISTENCE AS AI! HYPOCRITE!”
Like, what are we even doing here.
“Oh, Sèphera, that’s not the point. The evil is GENERATIVE AI, not all the other AI!
Sure, sure. Let’s somehow separate one form from another.
Pick and choose your evil so that you can keep gatekeeping and let the oligarchs win as the little people continue to fight against each other.”
She’s very close here to getting it, actually.
Yes, you can separate one form from another. In fact, you really should, because that’s how reality works — different things are in fact different. Worse things are worse than better things!
It’s like saying that eating food includes eating a Thanksgiving turkey and eating your neighbor, Dave. Well, they’re both eating! Oh, what! We’re going to separate one form from another now!! Way to gatekeep my cannibalism, you bully!!!
“Yes, we know AI is using up resources. So does driving a car or a plane. So does building a new home. So do a lot of things. Humans have always used up Earth’s resources and usually not nicely. There are reservations and other Indigenous communities in Canada that have never had clean water and have been ravaged by pipeline construction. But somehow that’s been okay for the past fifty years or a hundred years, and very few people scream about that. But suddenly, AI is the enemy, not everything else we’ve been doing all along.
Suddenly YOUR water might not be so clean, so now it’s a Big Deal.”
“Humans have always used resources, and indigenous people have always been fucked over, so oh well” is not neither a nice nor particularly realistic argument. “Nothing can ever be better, so make things worse” is essentially the thrust of it.
“All the drama and arguments in the horror writing field would be less prevalent if people could have conversations and educate each other. No one really and truly knows what’s going on or even what the bottom line or end goal is. But what we do know is that here at the HWA, we are all writers, we all work in publishing in some capacity, and AI is here to stay. HWA has a public stance against generative AI. But not everyone knows what that is or even how to use it.
Instead of blocking people and then telling others to block those people because those people DARED to explore AI potential for their own careers, why not be human and educate each other? Watch out for each other. Help each other. RAISE EACH OTHER UP.“
I don’t really even understand what all of this means, and honestly, re-reading her screed just makes me both annoyed and tired.
Here, I think, is the thrust of it.
Her essay behooves us writers to be “human” and to “raise each other up.”
Except, AI is not human.
It’s made of humans! It took so much of what makes us very interesting and chucked it all inside a fucking Instant Pot and let it simmer until it’s all just steamy goo. So, seeing people use it — meaning, scooping up ladlefuls of material stolen from their peers — sure doesn’t feel like them raising us up (except to their greedy lazy pig mouths), so why are we obliged to raise them up? It’s the “tolerate my intolerance” with an AI-friendly spin on it.
None of this is new from me, but I think it really behooves people to understand why some folks are so very angry at AI, at its creators, and at those quislings who dare to use it.
It’s very serious to us — a theoretically-existential threat! — to have our work taken without our permission and used to feed gluttonous software designed by techbros who literally say the quiet parts out loud when they talk about how it’ll destroy jobs, how we’re all gonna have to move to the fucking moon or instead live in a bunker beneath a data center somewhere, how if they actually had to pay creators for licensing rights they’d be bankrupt. They steal our work, they throw it into the machine like so much coal, and then use it to enrich themselves while simultaneously harming the environment and poisoning the fidelity of all our information systems. It is very clear that they want to treat information and knowledge as a resource to be mined — a utility to control, one that can be leveraged to extract payment from us. We and our work is all just material — Capital-C Content — to be melted down into slag.
So yeah! We’re kinda fucking mad about it! And when we see someone we like using it, we kinda want to kick some sand onto your shoes. You look like a sell-out. Like someone who just sold his buddy to the Cannibal Farm down the road. When someone like Hank Green is found to be using AI, it’s not that I think Hank Green — who by all reports seems like a lovely guy! — should be strung up by his heels and hit with crowbars. But it’s still disappointing. Because he’s a science communicator whose whole schtick is to answer questions and provide some measure of entertaining truth while also being someone interested in and invested in the health and wellness of our world and society — so when he’s seen using technology that sure seems to be damaging the health and wellness of our world and society, meaning it’s harming the many to benefit the few, well, yeah, you’re going to see people wanting to take him to task for that.
All this goes back to the fact that the HWA — and the SFWA, and the Author’s Guild, and so on and so forth — are professional writing organizations.
And using generative AI is not only not writing, it should not be a part of writing, and it should be viewed as antithetical to our crafts and our careers. And before you say “but what about autocorrect,” know that you and I both know what I’m talking about when I say generative AI or LLMs and it doesn’t mean using fucking spellcheck, okay? Okay.
If you wanna use AI, I can’t stop you.
But I can definitely give you a look like you just giddily shit your pants on a crowded train. That’s not me bullying you. That’s me acknowledging you shat yourself willfully and with joy and now we’re all having to deal with it.
You make your choices.
As for the HWA, I sure hope they’re going to walk this back and try to ensure something like this does not happen again, because it’s hard to stay a member of the organization if they can’t keep something so simple as their newsletter under control. Anyway. Have a great day. And fuck AI, amen.
(And by “the demons,” I mean, my excellent merch designer, Jordan Shiveley.)
So! The Calamities tour — henceforth known as the BEST FIENDS FOREVER tour — is gonna start kicking into gear in a couple weeks, with me hitting: Philly, NYC, Doylestown (for Dark Ink, baby), Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago-area, Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis, Denver, St. Louis, and Charlotte-area (Belmont Litfest!) in the first wave, then a couple more dates in October (NYCC, Ottawa Can*Con, Hudson Valley, New Hampshire, Burlington VT). I come to spread the gospel of the fiends and demons to thee, lost souls!
And with that in mind, there are now COOL TOUR SHIRTS.
We did shirts for Black River Orchard, and they seemed a big hit —
So it was time to do some for this tour.
Thanks to Jordan for these — several versions are available!
Check ’em out and wear ’em to the tour if you got ’em.
And I do hope you’ll come check out the tour — the tour dates and links are here. I’m trying to hit some spots I haven’t hit before! Come see me and other cool writers talk about, well, I dunno, demons and apples, probably.
Please check out the book! Or I perish in the great abyss!
You can order signed copies from several of the bookstores I’ll be traveling to, so you can always check in with them — or my own local store, Doylestown Bookshop, can send to you, as well.
