Contents ( 64)
- PART ONE
- ONE
- TWO
- INTERLUDE
- THREE
- FOUR
- INTERLUDE
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- INTERLUDE
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- INTERLUDE
- TWELVE
- PART TWO
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- INTERLUDE
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- INTERLUDE
- TWENTY
- INTERLUDE
- TWENTY-ONE
- INTERLUDE
- TWENTY-TWO
- INTERLUDE
- TWENTY-THREE
- PART THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- INTERLUDE
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- INTERLUDE
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- INTERLUDE
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- INTERLUDE
- THIRTY-ONE
- INTERLUDE
- THIRTY-TWO
- INTERLUDE
- THIRTY-THREE
- INTERLUDE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- INTERLUDE
- FORTY-ONE
- About the Author
- Acknowledgments
- CHUCK WENDIG in conversation with Adam Christopher
terribleminds.com
Acknowledgments
Authors all look like we lone wolf it, like we are ronin-ninja-without-clan, like it's just us out there traversing the icy creative sea in our little tugboats. The book has our name on it and nobody else's, and at the end of the day, that's a big face full of nonsense. No book comes to term without a whole ecosystem supporting the birth of that book. Like Soylent Green, a book is made of people, and I'd like to thank those people, now. Thanks first to Stephen Susco for helping me hammer this thing in shape. Thanks to Jason Blair and Matt Forbeck for suggesting Angry Robot as a potential home for Miriam Black. Thanks to my agent, Stacia Decker, for helping make that happen, and further, thanks to all the great folks – Lee, Marco, Darren – at Angry Robot who are the nicest cuddliest steel-and-circuitboard overlords an author guy like me could ever have. Thanks too to Joey HiFi for offering up one of the coolest covers I could've ever imagined. Have you looked at that cover? Seriously. Take another long. Stare at it. Go ahead. You can caress it. I won't tell anybody. Thanks to my many readers at terribleminds. And thanks to my wife, Michelle and my newborn, Ben. Both of which keep me sane when I need to be sane, and encourage me to be crazy when I need to be crazy. Love you guys.
CHUCK WENDIG in conversation with Adam Christopher
The end! Right? Well, for the moment anyway, but Miriam Black returns in MOCKINGBIRD in September 2012. So while we wait – and boy, what a wait! – let's get the author himself, Mr Chuck Wendig, in the interrogation chair, apply the electrodes, and turn the voltage up. It's okay. He says he enjoys it.
Let's start at the top: where did Blackbirds come from?
The same place all authors get their ideas: a small defunct post office in Topeka, Kansas. We receive a red envelope. We open it with a tincture of tears and blood. And inside is the idea. A ghost waiting to be given bones and flesh.
Okay, maybe not.
Like with most stories, Blackbirds doesn't precisely have a single point of origin – lots of disparate elements came crashing together one night and, boom, an idea baby was born.
First: two songs. "Another White Dash" and "Life Is Short" by Butterfly Boucher. Can't reprint the lyrics here but it's worth Googling – both deal with traveling and crashing on couches and being a bit of a drifter and, in the case of the latter song, how life is indeed an all-too-brief thing. (At least, that's how I read 'em.)
Second: death. Over the period of a few years, several of my loved ones passed away. Both grandmothers, one from cancer, one from a seemingly endless series of strokes. Then my aunt died: cancer. Then my father died: cancer.
Death has this very special way of making you feel helpless – you can't see the Grim Reaper arrive, but arrive he does and with a swoop of his unstoppable scythe the people you love and need are taken away lickety-split.