Novel sale: STAY CRAZY to Apex Publications

It's on the publisher's blog, so it's official: I'm going to have a novel published. Here's the blurb:

Nineteen-year-old stock girl Emmeline Kalberg isn't surprised when voices start speaking to her through the RFID chips embedded in frozen food containers. Ever since she left college after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, voices have been a mainstay of her life, something to be ignored. But when Em's fellow employees at Savertown USA start dying around her, victims of a mysterious suicide plague, she decides to listen in. What she hears has the potential to tear apart the fabric of her small western Pennsylvania town -- and maybe the entire world.

The story of Stay Crazy began in 2006, when I wrote a novel called Entity that melded my experiences working for Walmart in that strange-ass year after I graduated college with my love of stories that question the nature of reality. Then a year later I quit writing for reasons that made a lot of sense at the time, and the novel was basically trunked along with the rest of my writing. But the story never left me, I always wished I had done something with the novel, and that wish especially grew stronger when I un-quit and my writing reached a whole new level. Some time last year, I pulled out the novel and well... I'm a much better writer than I used to be. So I rewrote it, line by painstaking line. I gave the story the writing it deserved.

And now... it's going to be published. My weirdo reality-bending category-bending novel with a mentally ill, working-class protagonist living in a shitty small town is going to be available for anyone to read, anytime, anywhere. I'm especially stoked to be published by Apex, since they've released a whole lot of books I've just loved.

Publication date is set for August 2016, so mark your calendars! In related news, I will be at WorldCon next year, so... book release party? Book release party, yes.

EEEEEE!!!!!!

I Bet Owning a Gun Is Awesome

Like everyone else, I'm somewhat shocked but mostly desensitized about the mass shootings in... you know what, I don't even have to name a city here, because there's just gonna be another one tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that. I don't understand why people can't see that all of these shootings are connected to the fact that guns in the United States are plentiful and unregulated and that we have a culture that worships guns. I can't see why the right to own a gun should be more important than the right not to be shot by a gun.

However, I think there might be an aspect to this that I've been overlooking. Because, like a lot of people who criticize gun culture, I've never owned a gun.

I mean, what if owning a gun is literally the absolute best thing ever? What if the mere fact of owning an automatic weapon is like the greatest high that a human being can ever hope to experience, like snorting a bunch of coke and high-fiving the Pope while riding a golden unicorn? And what if the sensual pleasure of gun ownership intensifies every time you leave the ammunition in, or store it out of its safe, or let your children play in the same room as the gun?

Pictured: a first-time gun owner.

Because that would explain it, right? If you take a group of rational humans and tell them that gun control will save hundreds of lives, if you tell them about Australia and some other stuff about Australia and also show them charts aplenty, then nearly everyone will be like "yeah, maybe we should get rid of some of these guns, because come on look at this shit." But maybe instead it's like telling a group of junkies about the dangers of heroin. Sure, they can rationally understand that heroin will kill them. Contrary to popular stereotypes, most addicts are not in denial about their preferred substances. They just can't stop.

And what if there's withdrawal symptoms? Maybe taking a gun owner's gun away is like going cold turkey on OxyContin. You get the shakes, you start hallucinating tiny European monarchs in your house taxing you without representation, shit like that. Man, I wouldn't want that to happen to me! Why do I gotta go through gun detox when I'd never shoot anyone? C'mon bud, just gimme one little Kalashnikov to get me through the end of the week. Maybe it's almost cruel to make gun owners give up their guns, although not as cruel as sitting around with our thumbs up our asses while hundreds of people die or anything.

In closing, based on no evidence whatsoever I believe that owning a gun must create a high so incredibly great that it makes you override your natural empathy and rationality to get a taste of that sweet, sweet steel. Therefore, I propose a new slogan for the gun control movement:

GUNS: NOT EVEN ONCE.