Did  you have the most fantastic idea for a book and now you are 30,000 words in and staring longingly at the ending and wondering how the heck you are going to get there? Here are some things that might help.

1. Go on a walk without a phone or any device except a pen and paper. State to yourself, in as simple terms as possible, the problem of what you are stuck on. Example: Casey and Allison need to get back into the city and get caught. How do they get into the city and how do they get caught? Think about your questions hard for the first five minutes of your walk, and then let it go and enjoy the great outdoors, smell flowers, and stop for some coffee. Drink coffee and scribble out some notes. I almost always get the answer to my questions at some time on these walks.
2. Tell someone about the place in the story you are stuck. Tell them they have to listen to all your ranting and then, when you are done, they are only allowed to ask questions.
3. Write down six different things that could solve your problem. Don’t worry if they would all be terrible. Write down a seventh one. Stare at it. Now doodle all over your paper. It’s fine if it’s phallic: that happens. Then crumple up and the paper and throw it in the trash and then take it out again, if you want.
4. Think of the most complex way to solve the problem of your story. This may include guns. Think of the easiest. This may include people being way kinder than they would ever be in real life. Think of the weirdest way you could solve the problem.
5. Draw the picture of this part of the story. Map that shit out. It can be a really ugly map. It can be any definition of map you have. It can be the worst map in the world.
6. Write a love letter to this part of your book about all the things you’d like it to do and if this letter ends up looking like a serial killer wrote it that is totally not a problem for the book but it might be a problem for you but let’s not worry about that right now.

Good luck!

Or I mean, two books I’ve read recently and loved.

Wonders of the Invisible World by Christopher Barzak.
Isn’t that a beautiful title. My 5 y.o. asked me what I was reading and when I told her, she repeated the title all day long as she twirled around. The book lives up to the great title, and is magical, interesting, and strange. Thoroughly enjoyed this young adult book.

Shadowshifter by Daniel Jose Older
Daniel, are you a secret super spy who invaded my subconscious and plucked all the tropes that I love and crammed them into one lovely book? Probably not, but this book has magical murals, a cast of vivid characters not drawn from the white middle class, the real New York, and so much more. Loved it.

A friend of mine, who I have never met in real space/time but a friend nonetheless who has done whip-smart editing for me and is generally a great person in the writerly sphere, has written a book I am wild to read. It’s called “Stay Crazy,” and it’s out now from Apex Press. Why am I so excited? First, this blurb:

“Had Philip K. Dick lived through riot grrrl and the collapse of the America’s industrial economy, STAY CRAZY would be his memoir. Erica Satifka is a prophet.”
—Nick Mamatas, author of SENSATION and I AM PROVIDENCE

Nick, another friend, never ever says a word he doesn’t mean, and if he likes a book, I’m generally in. And did you notice the PKD and Riot Grrl reference? Those are two things I will always want to read. Aside from this book being wildly well suited to some things I specifically love, there is another huge reason I can’t wait to read it.

There is am issue in books and the narratives we tell each other in who gets to be the hero? The prince? Or maybe the princess, or if we are being really wild maybe the commoner girl with a plucky heart of gold. For those of us who tell stories, we know heroes are tricky business because you want the reader to identify with the main character, and so the fall out of that is that heroes and protagonist often only come in a very narrow band of race, class, culture, country, gender, and disability. People are working on that, of course. Lots of amazing writers are working on that.  “Stay Crazy” is working on that, too.

See, the protagonist in Stay Crazy is Emmeline Kalberg, who was institutionalized after having a breakdown. She has the kind of mental illness that is hard to understand with hallucinations and a lifelong illness in front of her. Our society stigmatizes Schizophrenia in a huge way, and often imagines if someone hear’s voices they are one step away from axe murdering someone. Trust me on this one, as someone who has worked in community mental health for over fifteen years. Being psychotic makes people suspicious of you at best, and imagine you are villainous and need to be locked up at worst. But in this book? Emmeline Kalberg gets to be an awesome, complex, and worthy hero driving this story that is not centered around the fact that she is mentally ill, but is about her being human, working at a mall, and having troubles with aliens.

I can’t wait to read it. You can buy it here.

I have been delving into this young adult climate fiction first draft which is simultaneously exciting and terrifying. It’s a book that’s been brewing like the dankest coffee in the percolator at the back of my mind for a long time. I love it so much and really want to do it justice. I’ve tried to write it a couple of times and failed because I have had all the ideas but none of the plot. I have the plot now. I have the characters who are delicious hot messes one and all, I even have the setting (though I have yet to pick which small Alaskan town it takes place in.) Ready, set, go!

Only… the weather has been so delicious lately. Mid 70’s with the wild fecundity that only a rainy city in Spring can pull off. There are literally flower petals swirling through the air that look like snow when it is windy, and beauty holding  her nature pageant in every square inch of this town. The kids, whose event horizon of memory is way shorter than mine, are utterly marvelling in the sunshine and the growing world, because for them, it’s their first spring, really, because the other ones were so long ago. And even though this isn’t my first rodeo, it feels like the sun on my skin is a new things. Which it is. April in the Pacific Northwest should be mucky, wet, and still gray. Whatever this weather is, it isn’t normal. We broke the record for the warmest day in April in 122 years. We break records, like everywhere else, every year and humans, we really need to be doing something, a lot of things about this. Maybe I should write a book about it….

It will shock precisely no one when I say that I read a lot of books, sometimes two or three at a time. In the past three years I’ve been on the Andre Norton Award jury, which means I’ve been tasked with reading a glorious amount of teen speculative fiction. It was amazing and extremely informative about what kinds of narratives are being published right now and what kind of books drive me bananas in all the right ways. Anyway, I’m done and having a YA palate cleanse (though I’ll be back, rather soon I expect) and reading widely. It turns out there is a whole world of books that aren’t about the trials and tribulations of being a teenager in the middle of the apocolypse/multiverse/troubled utopia. Who knew?

Usually, I come to books with some knowledge about what kind of books they are and what people think of them, but I’ve been entirely grabbing random books from the little free libraries that populate my neighborhood and seeing what I find.

Some gems!

1. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

So, why didn’t everyone tell me to read this when it came out? It’s so good, and circus tales are deeply in my wheelhouse. It’s fascinating, from a writer’s perspective, how much every character’s inner life is left off the page and this evokes that wonderful reading experience where it lives as much on the page as in my head. Wildly delicious.

2. Fanny at Chez Panisse by Alice Waters

Charming, charming, no one is shocked that Alice Waters is charming, right? But this is such a tidy book told from a little kid’s perspective about restaurant life and a love of food. I loved reading it and I’m looking forward to reading it to my kids when they are older. Really loved that child’s sense of wonder about how food is made, how bread works, and the love of garlic. Also, such a score at the free library. Thanks, neighbors.

3. Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay

I’m in the middle of this one, but liking it a lot. This is not my first rodeo with Mr. Kay, and I’m enjoying dipping back into his writing which I find lush and romantic in ways that work for me. Historical fantasy can be a hard sell for me because then I’m left wondering about true histories and wishing I was less of a fiction hound and would just read a brick on the Byzantine Empire, but this one feels well researched and immersive.

Happy reading to all, and hope you are finding great books as you wander around the world.

I haven’t been posting much on this site because I have been having some technical difficulties. But, all things seemed to be solved so please to be expecting some exciting posts in the near future about writing, books, writing books, and other human related activities.

Huzzah! Today is the publication day for The King’s Leash, my seventh novella of The Fay Morgan Chronicles.

What’s going on in Fay Morgan land? Well, to start, Morgan le Fay is in a terrible mood. Not only is she the unwilling master of her best friend, the djinn Lila, but Lila’s boyfriend has been made Sheriff of Seattle by some mysterious force. He won’t explain how or why, and wears a strange silver star upon his hip.

Soon Morgan and Merlin find themselves exploring a faerie hill hidden in the middle of Seattle. The famed witch and wizard go there to stop a violent creature, but what they find sets in motion a series of events that Morgan could not have possibly imagined. It drags everyone into its twisted and gray web, where everything comes at a price, and even kings wear leashes.

I love The King’s Leash, and I hope you will too! Also, while you are at my website, please feel free to sign up for my newsletter. Thanks!