My Top Five Favorite Video Games

I get asked a lot if I play video games and what they are, and my answers are never quite satisfying for people. I have very specific tastes in video games which I think reveal a lot about me as a person.

First, A Few Preferences:

1) I Do Not Play Console Games

I haven't played a console game since I had my Nintendo 64--which, to be clear, was the absolute pinnacle of gaming. It has never gotten better than all night binges of Goldeneye and Mountain Dew when you're 20 years old.

I don't have anything against console games, I just can't figure out how to use the controllers. And I know this makes me an old man. But I got rid of my N64 around 2005 and went at least six or seven years before ever picking up a console controller--and I could just never figure it out again. I can't use the two joysticks at the same time. It's miserable, and I don't enjoy it enough to want to continue to learn.

2) I Do Not Play Multiplayer Games

I play games that are relaxed and that I can pause and walk away from, and that doesn't jive well with multiplayer games. I don't want to inconvenience the other players if it's turn-based, and I obviously can't leave a battle in the middle if it's something action oriented. So I don't ever play multiplayer.

3) I Do Not Play Mobile Games

With the exception of the New York Times games, I have always avoided mobile games, and it's not because I don't think they're good, but it's because I think they could be very easily addictive, and I spend a lot of time on my phone--I don't want having a little addictive poison pill sitting in my pocket all the time.

4) I Just Don't Play Video Games Very Much?

Don't get me wrong, as you see when I talk about the games below, I love me some video games. They're just a tertiary hobby after other more dominant hobbies like writing and miniature wargaming. Video games only get played if 1) I'm very stressed, or 2) I need to kill a day. The most common time I play video games is when my wife is gone somewhere--away at her sister's or on a vacation--and it's not because "good, the old Ball And Chain is gone and I can finally play games", it's "ack, I'm uncomfortable and I need to turn my brain off for the next two days".

5) I Play Video Games on (Relatively) Easy Mode

I'm not trying to be an esports gamer. I want to play for escapism and I want the ability to successfully win. I mean, I still like to challenge myself, but I can't imagine a world where I would want to play a game on Nightmare Mode, or whatever.

My Favorite Video Games

For starters, these are not my favorite Of All Time, because if we were talking about All Time then I'd be including old stuff like Original Nintendo Mega Man, and I haven't played that in 35 years. These are my favorite that I still go back to. Some of them are quite old, but I still love them.

Empire: Total War

The Total War series is one of my favorite of all time. The basic idea is that you have a large map on which you move armies, build cities, develop industries, and research tech. Kinda Civilizationish, but not exactly. But then the cool thing is that when you get into a battle, it zooms in and you control your army's tactics: so if your army is full of 10 infantry and 5 cavalry units and 2 cannons, then you control each one of those individually. So Total War gives you the strategic AND tactical aspects of war, and they just do it really well.

I've played a ton of the Total War games, with some of my favorites being Warhammer 2 and 3, Shogun II, and Napoleon, but my favorite hands down is Empire: Total War, which takes place all around the globe from the time period of 1700 to 1800. It is just so rich with options. You can play something like 18 different nations, from the powerful British to the very not powerful United Provinces, or the Mughal Empire.

And I've sunk, no kidding, over 3000 hours into this game. (Before you get too worried, it came out 15 years ago and I've been playing it this whole time.) I don't think there's a single strategy I haven't tried, a single empire I haven't led to global domination. It's just fun.

Civilization VI

I have been playing Civilization since the original DOS version, and I've always loved it, but it was perfected in Civ 6, which is probably why once they reached 6 they kinda hung around there and didn't push it further but just released DLC after DLC for years and years.

But the game is so fun, for a lot of the same reasons that I liked Empire Total War. I like the options of being able to play as a wide variety of nations, with a wide variety of strategies. I like challenge myself when I go into the game to say "Okay, this time I'm going to play very aggressive and get a domination win" and sometimes I say "I'm going to build a ton of churches and get a religion win" or culture or technology, or whatever.

It's just a great game.

BattleTech

Maybe this is a niche game, but I'm a niche gamer. BattleTech is a wargame that I have been aware of/played since the 7th grade. You basically fight in teams of four big mechs. The problem with the pencil and paper wargame is that it is extremely "crunchy" which basically means that it gets very very detailed and can get tedious when you're having to do all the math by hand. For example, when you target an enemy, you can hit them in any number of locations. from the leg to the torso to the head and so on--and when you do, you damage the systems that are contained within that location. So, if I shoot you in the torso and that torso has a rocket launcher, some autocannon ammo, and a heat sink, then my shot to that torso could damage all (or none) of those things, which would render them either harder to use or completely unusable.

All of this makes it hard to play with pencil and paper. But when you put it into a video game where the computer does all the math? It's awesome.

I have sunk many hundreds of hours into this game, too, and this I think is my current comfort game.

(I admit that I hacked the files--"hacked" is a strong word for something pretty simple--and made it easier for myself to get money so I could access the bigger and better mechs. But that's how it goes.)

Silent Storm

I bet you haven't heard of this one, and it's because it's a terrible game. But it has so much potential!

This is a turn-based strategy game that follows your team of six commandos in World War Two--you can play as the Axis or the Allies. And all of that is great. You play, your grenadier throws grenades, your engineer fires bazookas, and your sniper snipes. It's a ton of fun and exactly what I want in a turn based strategy game.

The problem is that you reach a certain level and the game says "Wait a minute--now this is a sci-fi game, and all the skills that you've honed, like stealth, are useless." It puts you in dieselpunk mech suits and they're slow and clunky and there's never enough ammunition to use them and they're overpowered, and the game is just super dumb.

But that first fifteen missions before the mechs show up? Pure gold.

Did I mention this game came out 20 years ago? Yes, it and I are old.

Putting Things in Boxes

For those who haven't been following my every movement (shame on you) I ran a website dedicated to miniature wargaming. It got very very popular and ran for many years, but the fickleness of the Google algorithm updates did a lot of damage to me and it eventually became more expensive to maintain--it stopped paying off.

Anyway, I've been playing miniature wargames since I was nine years old. My dad had stumbled on a copy of Wargames Illustrated and brought it home, and I was instantly hooked. The miniatures, the maps, the rules--I was in love. I have played and collected miniature wargames for decades, spending many thousands of dollars on this hobby.

But something happened when the website died (which happened about a year ago). I lost the love. I still get excited looking at minis, but I just don't care about it in the way that I used to.

I was afraid to abandon it because it's been not just a hobby but a part of my identity for most of my life. My bedroom has four floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that are filled with miniatures. And now they just seem oppressive. They're not interesting and they actively make me feel bad about myself because, well, it's like I've failed. And I don't mean failed with my website, but failed to be the megafan that I've always been.

I brought this up in therapy this week (I go to therapy and think everyone should go to therapy) and she asked why I didn't just box some of it up and put it in storage. And I had reason after reason, but eventually it came down to: do I want to give up on who I have been AND more importantly, does my wife want me to give up on something I have always been.

(This is not to say that I thought she loved miniature wargaming--she doesn't care about it at all. It's that I worried that I'd be disappointing her if I let my hobby go. Like, if she told me one day that she didn't want to be an artist anymore, I'd worry if something was wrong with her.)

So we talked about it. And, she was incredibly supportive of the idea, because she could tell that my heart's not in it right now. It may come back, but it's not there right now.

(She also expressed that she would love to have some of that bookshelf space in the bedroom.) :)

So the plan is that I'm going to (slowly) sort through all of my stuff and select the ones that are most important to me, and put all the rest in boxes.

For those in the know, I'm keeping all my Stormcast Eternals (from Warhammer) and plan to paint them. Everything else is going in a glass display shelf or a box.

I feel good about this. It feels like a good change. Writing has come back as a pastime, so it's okay to let something else go.

This Is Not Writing Advice

So, I wrote a book. Or, at least a draft. And I'm really, really happy with it. And here is how I did it, and here is not writing advice for anyone.

First, I have been struggling for some time with serious depression, as I have mentioned here and here. And this depression puts me in bed most of the time at 3:00pm, and it's been doing this for the past three years and it super, super sucks.

Well, as mentioned previously, my doctor changed my meds about three months ago at the same time that my therapist gave me some really high quality advice about behaviorism, and things have changed.

I mean, I still go to bed at 3:00pm, because I remain depressed. But it's a different kind of depression, and the new meds have bought me about three extra hours of productivity each day. The thing is: those hours are not in a row. It's just that between 3:00pm and bedtime, I have three hours sprinkled here and there.

So, the new thing that's worked is, first, I bought a new notebook and pen, and I filled that notebook up with an entire book's worth of ramblings. Not prose, just lists and outlines and brainstorming. But I filled the entire notebook, front to back, in about three weeks. And I had a pretty good idea for a book.

And then, I just started taking my laptop to bed with me and I'd lay down for an hour and then sit up and maybe churn through 45 minutes of good writing, and then lay down again. I don't like typing on a laptop actually on top of my lap--I cross my legs and put the keyboard on the bed and type in a fashion that is probably very bad for my back.

But I do it! And then I do it again and again, and I usually get through that three hours of productivity in four or five bursts and have 4000-5000 words to show from it each night. And, a month later I have a rough draft.

I don't follow an outline, which is super weird for me because I've always been an outliner. But I did so much notetaking in that notebook for weeks that I knew the story in my head, and then I just kinda pantsed the whole thing. And I loved pantsing! And I don't know why it worked?

And that's why none of this is writing advice: because I don't know what I'm doing, and I don't for the life of me know why my brain suddenly turned into Book Writing Mode and pumped out a book after five years of nothing. It's very weird, and even as I write this I have no idea if it's replicable.

Because while I've been waiting for readers to finish the rough draft and get back to me I have tried this method again and: it's not working the same! I don't know why! My brain is super dumb.

Anyway, I used to teach a lot at writing conferences, but I don't think I'm gonna do it again because my advice would be "Write when you're magically not depressed! Make it up as you go!"

And all of this will be for nothing if the book doesn't sell, so who knows. But for now it's a lot of fun.

Oh, hey. You want to know the working title of the book? I don’t have one yet. But the working title of the trilogy (it’s a trilogy) is The Catechisms of Mars.

My One Political Post for 2024

I'm trying not to be political. I know that there's very little that I can say that will sway anyone one way or the other. But I wanted to say this:

Eighteen long years ago, I wrote The Counterfeit, book about the Illuminati and about conspiracy theories. And there was one big takeaway from that:

People believe in conspiracies because it is easier to believe a simple answer than a complex answer. It is easier to believe that there is a cabal of people in a smoke-filled room making the important decisions.

Take, for instance, inflation. I don't care whose side you're on but here's the deal:

Things That Control Inflation:

The Myth:

• A President and their administration

The Truth:

• Increased Consumer Spending

• Government Spending

• Export Demand

• Low Unemployment

• Rising Production Costs

• Supply Chain Disruptions

• Import Prices

• Energy Costs

• Money Supply Growth

• Interest Rates

• Currency Depreciation

• Inflation Expectations

• Wage-Price Spiral

• Market Power and Monopolies

• Global Commodity Prices

• Geopolitical Events

• Tax Changes

• Deficit Spending

• Global Recessions or Booms

• Trade Imbalances

My Point:

It is very, terribly easy for us to say "well the problem is the president's tax plan" or "the problem is government spending", but the answer is that it's ALL OF THE THINGS.

Of course, you have to choose between one candidate or the other, so if your main deciding factor in this election is inflation--though I cannot believe how it possibly could be with all the other stuff going on--then you need to pick a president that matches up with the things on that list as best you can, but ALSO recognize that there's a lot of stuff on that list that no president can control.

My Bigger Point:

This conspiracy thinking applies to a whole lot more than inflation. Inflation is just an easy example. My point in all of this is can be summed up by the inestimable travel host Rick Steves, in his documentary about Fascism (which I suggest you all watch right here for free): "Beware of any leader who presents easy solutions to complex problems."

And that's it. That's all the political posts you're going to get from me this year.

I Wanna Get Better, by Bleachers

I've been posting the top songs you need to know to know me, and there's nothing on that list (maybe) higher than Bleacher's I Wanna Get Better.

This song came out in 2014, at a time when I was going through some really serious shit. I had schizophrenia--I had started showing symptoms in 2011--but I wasn't going to be officially diagnosed until 2017. And things were just really, really, desperately bad.

At the same time, my oldest kid was also beginning to show signs of an anxiety disorder and was struggling in school (we would later learn that he was autistic and also bipolar).

And then I Wanna Get Better came out, and it was his and my theme song. Every single morning while I was driving him to freshman year of high school, we would blast this in the car and sign it at the top of our lungs.

The verses themselves don't necessarily relate to Jonas or me, because they're very personal to Jack Antonoff. He's basically going through every traumatic experience that he's had in his life, from 9/11 to a bad acid trip to the death of his sister. He says, according to Wikipedia, that this song is his "mission statement".

Well it became Jo and my mission statement. Because we both desperately, desperately wanted to get better from these things that we, at the time, did not understand at all.

Wildfire, by Mandolin Orange

The Wikipedia entry on Mandolin Orange—who changed their name and now go by Watchhouse—a folk duo led by Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz, describes them as "bearing the stamp of folk, country, bluegrass, gospel and pop, all mingled in a unique melange perhaps best described simply as modern American roots music." Putting aside the fact that this flowery language probably means the article was written by their publicist, the description is rather apt. Marlin plays the titular mandolin, plus guitar and banjo, and Frantz plays guitar and violin. And, together, they have amazing harmonizing vocals.

But I want to talk today about their song "Wildfire," because it's a stellar example of their musical range, but also a timely and piercing song about a culture of inherited racism and hatred.

The song begins in the Revolutionary War, referring to Joseph Warren:

Brave men fought with the battle cry

Tears filled the eyes of their loved ones and their brothers in arms

And so it went, for Joseph Warren

It should have been different

It could have been easy

His rank could have saved him

But a country unborn needs bravery

And it spread like wildfire

Joseph Warren, a patriot and revolutionary, had been commissioned as a Major General, but insisted on fighting as a private. He died in the Battle of Bunker Hill, but served as a catalyst for the revolution.

The song then jumps forward in time to the Civil War, first saying that from the ashes of the revolution brought sweet liberty, but then takes a somber tone and and declares that "too much money rolled in to ever end slavery, The cry for war spread like wildfire."

The entire song decries the endless cycle of hatred, declaring that the Civil War should have ended racism and hatred, but it only wounded it and made it fester.

Civil War came, Civil War went

Brother fought the brother, the South was spent

But its true demise was hatred passed down through the years

It should have been different It could have been easy

But pride has a way of holding too firm to history

And it burns like wildfire

Throughout the song, that middle couplet is repeated and emphasized: "It should have been different. It could have been easy," sung sometimes wistfully, and sometimes angrily. It should have been different. It could have been easy. Of course, the idea that it could have been easy is wishful thinking--it would never have been easy. But the sentiment is there in that it should have been different.

The song then jumps forward to the modern day, talking about those who "beat their chests and say that the south is going to rise again." "The day that old Warren died, hate should have gone with him, But here we are caught in wildfire."

They offer no solutions, only the sad refrain that hatred burns like wildfire, and the idea that it should be different, and it can be easy.

Creature Comforts, by Arcade Fire

There’s a song that’s been going through my head for a while now—I think it’s because I’m writing a book about teenage girls, but also because I’ve been thinking a lot about mental health generally.

The video for Arcade Fire's "Creature Comforts" shows the band--dressed in shimmering gold and silver, illuminated by spotlights and strobes--from the neck down. The style is synth-pop, synthesizers, electronica, and even a keytar. It sounds like dance music with a catchy melody and a strong bass line. It could be a song about anything—a peppy love song, a feel-good pop sensation.

It's about suicide, body shaming, cutting, depression, and self-hate. The video illustrates it, showing an overly-fantastical world where everything is light and flashing and glittering, as if to say "this is everything that you're supposed to be."

The repeated hook and chorus is:

Some girls hate their bodies,

Stand in the mirror and wait for the feedback.

Saying "God, make me famous.

If you can't, just make it painless"

It's a song about the harsh pressure put on girls (and boys) to be perfect, famous, and beautiful, and the lyrics are devastating:

Assisted suicide

She dreams about dying all the time

She told me she came so close

Filled up the bathtub and put on our first record

Saying "God, make me famous.

If you can't, just make it painless

Just make it painless."

The twist comes in the two-thirds through, where the singer replies to the girl in the mirror:

It's not painless

She was a friend of mine, a friend of mine

This isn't a trifling thing. Suicide isn't painless. The song continues with the refrain, finally ending with a short piece of simple advice:

It goes on and on, I don't know what I want

On and on, I don't know if I want it

On and on, I don't know what I want

On and on, I don't know if I want it...

Well if you're not sure, better safe than sorry

I find so much to love in this song, and so much to think about. I have depression and I've had suicidal ideation. I've self-harmed. But more than that, I think about my kids, and my teenagers, and the pressure that is put on them to look attractive and be popular.

(From a lyrical perspective, I think it's interesting that the word "painless", and the phrase "make it painless" are so immediately linked to suicide. The theme to M*A*S*H, after all, was "Suicide is Painless", but that show outdates the all the musicians in Arcade Fire, and most assuredly the majority of their listeners. But when we hear "make it painless", we know exactly what they're talking about. I find that interesting.)

Here’s the thing about the song that gets to me: I think it has to do with so much more than just teenagers. The older I get and the more I live on social media, the more I see people my age—and I’m in my mid forties—trying to look perfect for Instagram. I especially see this in the community of artists and authors I’m in: we all have to look like we have idyllic lives, because our lives are not just our lives—they’re our book advertisements. So we get dressed up for church every Sunday and we take a picture in front of the chapel in our fancy clothes, and we go on vacations to Mexico and show pictures of us eating delicious tacos (always with the caveat “I’m going to have to exercise so much to work this off but OMG tacos are my favorite!”). It just seems to be rampant and it bugs me so much.

And I’m not immune. I feel the pressure to conform to worldly body standards that everyone else does. I’m overweight, which I like to blame on the fact that so many of my meds have “side effect: may gain weight” on the label, but also… I don’t exercise like I should. And the fact is: I am 100% comfortable in my body. I don’t have body image issues for myself. But I do feel this unspoken “obesity is a moral failing” attitude surrounding me.

Of course, Creature Comforts also hits different because I have, in the past, dealt with both suicidal ideation (thankful not a lot, but enough to scare me) and self-harm (an awful lot for an awful lot of years).

Some girls hate themselves
Hide under the covers with sleeping pills and
Some girls cut themselves
Stand in the mirror and wait for the feedback

I don’t have an amazing conclusion to this except to repeat the words of the bridge: It’s not painless. There is so much pain surrounding self harm and suicide. And it’s not just the “It’s not painless—she was a friend of mine” type pain, because that’s telling people that they shouldn’t hurt themselves, because it causes pain to other people. It’s an important thing to note, but it’s not the primary reason that people should hurt themselves. Don’t not hurt yourself for me—don’t hurt yourself for you. It’s not painless, and it’s going to cause pain that you can’t imagine.

Do I Not Have the Tools to Write?

Allow me to let you in on a shameful secret: I really have a hard time reading.

I have mental illnesses (plural) one of which includes OCD. And one of the medications I take to control these obsessions and compulsions has a side effect: it makes it so I can't obsess about ANYTHING, meaning I can't keep my attention up for a long time in any real direction.

Note: this has nothing to do with ADHD, which I also have. No, this is something specifically meant to tamp down my ability to concentrate on a long-term project--like reading a book.

Because of this, I went a solid THREE YEARS OF MY LIFE without completing a novel (like reading, but also not writing). I couldn't even do audio books. Heck, I couldn't even do movies or stick with a TV series.

And I felt incredibly guilty because there's the famous quote from Stephen King, from On Writing (a book I absolutely love) which says "If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write."

And I totally agree with that statement! If you don't read, you shouldn't be writing. I've been in the writing world long enough to have met several--too many--authors who say they just don't have time to read now that they're a writer, and I think "That's bananas! That's not how this is supposed to work!"

Thankfully, my meds have changed making it possible for me to read again, though I do feel like the 3+ years I was not reading AT ALL make me impossibly behind in both understanding my market and in understanding the cultural zeitgeist. Things have changed between 2019, when I was reading a book a week (usually through audiobooks consumed during my 2 hour commute each day), and 2023, when I finally got back into regular reading.

I noticed that my tastes changed a little during that time--in terms of what I enjoy reading. I kind of really love hard science fiction now, where I was much more of a soft sco-fi guy before. I am getting really into the details, loving the deep dives into minutiae.

I'm still writing my same old style, though, I hope, a little better. I don't know. I think that my tastes have changed for the better, and I think that has made me try harder to write a little better, but my books continue to be the same old Rob Wells stuff--just with more care taken.

All of this to say, I welcome reader recommendations, because I feel like I am very out of the loop, especially when it comes to my preferred genre: YA science fiction. To be fair, the genre is suffering a little bit at the moment. The current craze seems to be romantasy and MG fantasy, and the YA sci-fi market has never recovered from the post-dystopia nosedive. But I'm still here! And I'm going to keep writing!

I Have Completed a Draft!

I have posted about how my brain is working SO MUCH BETTER because of some new meds that have been treating my depression. And it's been great! I have been absolutely unable to write a book, or to even concentrate on anything long-term for years. But once I started my new meds I was sitting in my bed, scribbling book ideas and outlines in a notebook for two weeks--filling a brand new notebook full from start to finish.

And then I kinda drafted the book in a month.

Yes! I have completed a draft of my new book, which does not have a title at this time but which I will call RED PLANET for ease of discussion.

I am in love with this book, in the way that you're in love with your first born child. And I think it's because it took so dang long for me to get back into a place where I could do it. I had fallen out of love with writing--and now I'm in love with it again!

The draft is an absolute mess, so let's just be clear about that.

For starters, I have always been a plotter, and on this book I started with an outline but 20,000 words in I decided to throw in a big twist. You know the big twist that happens at the very very end of Variant? I was going to pull another one of those at the end of RED PLANET, but when I got to the 20k mark I just thought "You know what? Let's just do it now." And thus the outline was completely out the window.

So I'm doing revisions now and realizing that, when I'm not working off an outline I just make up whatever-the-crap-I-want nonsense and shove it in the story. And sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. It's especially in a problem in a book like this which takes place on Mars in the future, because: science. I did not do my research before writing this book and am now having to look up stuff. Like what is "smart matter"? It's a thing I found in a list of possible future inventions, so hey! They now are using smart matter!

But it's a lot of fun. I haven't been in a character's head in so long, and I love it!

Also, I used to always joke with my wife that I didn't know what I used to think about before I wrote books--because when you're writing a book you're always living in that book. And that is totally back! I couldn't get to sleep last night because I kept thinking about my characters.

All of this to say, I'm really liking this book and I'm looking forward to a day in the vast distant future when you will get to read it. Who knows when or how.

Why Are All My Books Set in New Mexico?

Here's a thing you'll notice about my books: almost all have some connection to New Mexico.

• My first book, On Second Thought, was set in a fictional town called Los Alamitos that is 100% just based off of Grants and I don't know why I didn't call it Grants.

• Variant and Feedback, my first national books, were set somewhere in the Carson National Forest, up west of Taos and north of Espanola.

• Blackout and Dead Zone have characters from New Mexico (the opening scene is also set at Glen Canyon Dam, which I'll come back to in a second).

• Dark Energy's main character, Alice, had a grandma who lived on the Navajo reservation in scenic New Mexico.

• And on and on until my current work-in-progress which takes place on a different planet, but the main character is from Albuquerque.

So why do I keep setting all my books in New Mexico?

Well, for starters, New Mexico is pretty great. There is so much to love about that state. It is incredibly beautiful, rivaling even "We're So Great We Have Five National Parks: Utah". New Mexico is truly gorgeous. Also, culturally it's incredible. There are (I believe) fourteen different tribes that call New Mexico home; the biggest on is Navajo and most of the rest are pueblos, and pueblos are really super awesome. Also, when it comes to culture, New Mexico was settled by the Spanish (New Mexico is the second oldest European city founded in what is now the United States, way back in 1610--that's a long time ago!) And so the culture is very Spanish and not as much Mexican as the name would suggest. Still very Mexican, but super Spanish.

Taos Pueblo

And the food reflects all of these cultures. The food is incredible. If you've ever had green chile? New Mexico invented that! The best green chile comes from a little place called Hatch, and if it ain't Hatch Green Chile, it ain't green chile. Sorry, Colorado--you think you're neat, but you're not. (Just kidding. I lived in Colorado, too, and it's great.)

Hatch Green Chile

And this is to say nothing about the history of New Mexico. Yes, the pueblos have been there a super long time--the Sky City Pueblo on the Acoma Reservation is, arguably, the oldest continuously inhabited place in the United States, dating back a thousand years! (Maybe! People argue about it!) And there's the ruins of magnificent civilizations that lived there longer ago. The Ancestral Puebloans (formerly known as the Anasazi) were based out of New Mexico--in Chaco Canyon and Aztec and a hundred other sites. And if you know anything about anthropology you have probably heard about the Clovis culture, or "Clovis points". That's New Mexico, too! And then the Spanish showed up, and there were wars and atrocities and treaties and broken treaties, and the United States showed up to make and break even more treaties. It's just a place where a whole lot of stuff happened, and that culture is reflected everywhere you look.

Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon

So, Aside From the Fact That New Mexico is Objectively Awesome, Why Do You Put It In So Many Books?

Well, the fact is I lived there. But I lived there in an interesting way.

First of all, I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), and I was a missionary. Missionaries don't choose where they go, it's assigned. My brother went to Chihuahua Mexico. My dad went to Kobe Japan. You just go where you're called, and I was called to the New Mexico Albuquerque Mission NNAM. At the time, the NMAM covered New Mexico north of Socorro (so, about halfway up), everything in Arizona that was on the Navajo and Hopi reservations, a corner of New Mexico that includes Cortez, Durango, and Pagosa Springs, and a little chunk of Utah that was mostly polygamist towns (there are little towns of fundamentalist LDS people, or FLDS, who live down there. The mainstream LDS church does not condone polygamy and hasn't for over a hundred years. Anyway).

So. That's where I went on my mission. You leave on your mission--or I did at the time--when you're 19 years old, and you're mostly an idiot, because all 19 year olds are idiots. Missionaries try hard not to be idiots, but we're not only 19 but we're boys, and we're 19 year old boys who mostly have never lived on our own. We do a lot of stupid things.

(There are young women who go on missions, too, but they are, in my experience, not nearly as dumb--and generally not as young--as the boys.)

So, I do some training in a place called the Missionary Training Center, for a couple of weeks, and then I got shipped down to Albuquerque where a kid, who has looked like he has seen hell and lived to tell about it, picks me up in a pickup truck and we drive to the absolute middle of nowhere. My first area was called Pueblo Pintado, which is 100 miles from everywhere: 100 miles from Albuquerque, 100 miles from Gallup, and 100 miles from Farmington. It was on the eastern edge of the Navajo Reservation, and the town, such as it was, consisted of our trailer, a chapter house (kind of a government center--all Navajo communities have a chapter house), two hogans (traditional Navajo homes that are round and built from logs and mud, and a school for about 60 kids. This place was not a large place. It was rugged. It was rough. It was isolated. The nearest store was five miles up the road, and even that was just a convenience store--the nearest gas station was 45 miles away in Crownpoint.

The eponymous Pueblo Pintado

But I cannot tell you how much I loved living in Pueblo Pintado. It was absolute desert, but it was high desert--I think it was somewhere around 7000 feet--so an interesting climate. And it was full of sage and it smelled so good all the time. There were interesting rock formations all over, as we were very close to the Bisti Badlands, and I lived not only 15 miles from Chaco Canyon, which is amazing, but 3 minutes from the actual ruin called Pueblo Pintado. It was an Ancestral Puebloan great house, that was (if I remember right) at least three stories and had at least one great kiva and several smaller kiva. It was something like 30-40 rooms. And, at the end of the day, we'd just go and hang out there and watch the sunset, and it was amazing.

But I didn't always live on the reservation. I spent some time in Los Lunas, a city about 30 minutes south of Albuquerque. That was fun, but I wasn't there long enough to really get a sense of anything. (I should say that when you're on your mission you move around from area to area. I think it kinda keeps things fresh and doesn't let you get bored.)

I spent time in Page, Arizona, and was there during the winter. It's right at the edge of Lake Powell on the Arizona Utah border, and it's there where Glen Canyon Dam is situated--which features prominently in the beginning of Blackout. That was a gorgeous area--I mean, the Glen Canyon Dam is at the head of the Grand Canyon, so you know it's beautiful. But I wasn't there very long and I was quite sick while I was, so I didn't get out much.

Lake Powell viewed from Page, AZ

I went to Cortez, Colorado, which is in the very most southwestern corner of Colorado. That was a very cool place because--and I have no idea if this is accurate or if it was made up by someone local--but Montezuma County (that county) has more archaelogial sites per square mile than anywhere in North America. This is defining "archaeological sites" as anything from a scattering of potsherds to a cliff dwelling. But the stuff is really everywhere: the town has a lot of farming, and every farmer had a collection of things that they'd dug up while they were working their fields. (According to the Antiquities Act, it's legal to possess ancient artifacts if you found them on private land. I don't think that anyone except the private land owners are happy about that--they ought to be in museums--but the fact remains that this stuff was everywhere.)

And we went to Mesa Verde almost every week, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site as well as a National Park, that is awash with cliff dwellings. This place is spectacular, and if you ever get the chance you should absolutely go.

Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde National Park

But then I went to my favorite--and everyone else's most boring--place of all: Grants, New Mexico.

There is so much to love about Grants. First of all, it's weird. It had been the center of a major uranium mining boom and the town was huge and growing very rapidly. And then, sometime in the early 80s, the mines shut down, and this town that was getting so big lost half its population. So, there were boarded up buildings everywhere. Whole neighborhoods of shuttered apartment complexes. The town, at the time I lived there, was about 5000 people, and it could easily have handled twice that. All of which to say it was economically depressed.

But they were doing interesting things to make money. At least three prisons are in Grants (it might be four). And they were getting into big greenhouses when I was there. That's why, in my book On Second Thought, the main character, Walt, most to Los Alamitos to work at a big tomato greenhouse.

But getting aside from the weird economy, there is a lot to love in nature and history:

The town sits at the base of Mt. Taylor, which is one of the four sacred mountains for the Navajo. The sacred mountains, as I understand them, define the homeland of the Navajo and give protection to all who live inside their boundaries. So we were on the southeastern corner of those boundaries.

Mt Taylor

To the south was El Malpais, which is the Spanish word for Badland. It is a massive lava flow--Mt. Taylor is a volcano--and there is a lot of hiking and exploring to be done. At the time I lived there, you could go deep underground into the lava tubes and crawl around and do neat things, but I understand that it's closed to the public now.

El Malpais

To the southwest is the Zuni Mountains. And while I may have set Variant in the location of Carson National Forest, I imagined Variant in my head as the Zuni Mountains. So, whenever I'm describing the forests and hills surrounding Maxfield Academy in Variant and Feedback, I'm describing the Zuni Mountains.

There's El Morro about forty miles south, which is an oasis in the desert that people have been stopping at for millenia, and whenever they do they leave their mark on a massive butte. There's pictographs and petroglyphs, there's markings from the 1500s from early Spanish conquistadors. There's US Army from the 1800s. There's early Mormon pioneers. There's miners. There's everyone. It's really fascinating. That's a National Monument.

Inscriptions on El Morro

In Summary:

I write about New Mexico because New Mexico is a startlingly beautiful place. It has a magical culture (the motto is The Land of Enchantment, both because the land is enchantingly beautiful, and because the culture is based on magic). It has the best frigging food you'd find anywhere. It is just a remarkably wonderful place, and when I need to a character or a location, I just find so much to draw from there. It's like I'm a painter and I'm selecting colors--and all the best colors are from New Mexico. I am not nearly as inspired by anywhere else that I've traveled. I've set one book, Blackout, in Utah, but they leave Utah pretty quick and go somewhere more interesting.

New Mexico is just neat.

World Mental Health Day - 17 Pills

Today is World Mental Health Day. I thought it would be a good day to talk.

I wake up every morning at 4:55am. I do this because my brain is really good in the morning, and I'm jealous of how good it is--so I take as much good brain as I can get. If I'm feeling ambitious I'll often push this to 4:00am, but I'm often too sleepy.

The first thing I do is taken two pills: Modafinil, which is a drug designed to wake me up (which I need because in a second I'm going to tell you about the sedating drugs I take at night), and I also take an Adderall. This was a new addition to the regimen, as my doctor's attempt to get me out of the absolutely crippling depression I have in the afternoons. More on that later.

The next thing I do is go to the gas station and get that day's first dose of Diet Coke. I go to the gas station, rather than buying bulk Coke at Costco or something, because 1) it gets me out of the house, and 2) I use the cups of Coke that I buy--it's more than one--to set a routine by which I measure my day. This routine is incredibly useful. Throughout the day I am always aware of place in the universe because I know how much Coke I have and how much longer it's going to last.

Yes, I know I drink a lot of Diet Coke. My nutritionist and psychiatrist are both aware of it, and they agree that the benefits outweigh the harm so I will not be taking any questions on the topic thankyouverymuch.

I then try to be as productive as possible until around 8:00 or 8:30, when I start my day job. The job starts and my brain is still really good, so I buzz through things as fast as I can.

At 10:00am, I take more meds: 3 Wellbutrin, an anti-depressant that also helps with OCD; Xanax Extended Release, to help with anxiety; Metformin, for prediabetes (not a mental health drug, but one I take); and lithium, the kind of big daddy of immediate relief from depression and spiraling thoughts. I started lithium the day that I had a suicidal ideation crisis about six years ago, and it has done a very excellent job of making sure that those thoughts don't come back.

Then more work. Again, as fast as I can. Trying to pack it all in, because I know my time is limited.

At 2:00pm I take a second Adderall, a second Modafinil, and another lithium. This is all a new plan that is combatting my overwhelming depression. And it totally works! It used to be that I would go to bed every day at 3:00pm and just be sad and scroll my phone until bedtime. It was misery. I STILL go to bed at 3:00pm, but I can actually be productive for a good three or four hours from bed, on my laptop. That's actually where I am typing this.

I cannot tell you how incredibly life changing that tiny change--the afternoon Adderall and Modafinil--has been for my just overall life. I feel like a new person. And this is new! I've only been doing this for about two months. It's so great.

At 3:00pm, before I go to bed, I go to the gas station for my second Diet Coke fill up. This one is also to set a routine--that routine is SO important--but it's also to delineate a very specific END OF WORK and BEGINNING OF THE REST OF THE DAY. So I do that.

Then, I do stuff, on my laptop and on my phone, for the rest of the day. The entire rest of the day, like until 10:00pm, when it's time for bed. At bedtime I take 2 Metformin, another Xanax XR, another lithium, an escitalopram (which is another antidepressant that I can't think of the brand name for), and a little rosuvastatin pill for cholesterol.

And then I take two Saphris, which are my Miracle Schizophrenia Meds, which have stopped me from having a SINGLE hallucination or delusion for the past five and a half years. These meds are amazing, but they also knock me out (hence the need for Modafinil in the morning).

Anyway, these are my meds. which, if I'm doing my math right, come to seventeen pills a day.

Here's why I'm telling you all of this, and why I always talk about my mental health treatment: because it's normal and okay. I take a lot of pills! Who cares! Pills are literal miracles that have been found to make peoples' lives better! Do they have side effects? Yes, absolutely, and I have to deal with that and it sucks. But they make me not see things that aren't there and believe things that aren't true! They make me not want to hurt myself! They make me be able to--I don't know--accomplish small tasks between 3:00pm and 10:00pm! These things are all miracles.

And it's not just that taking pills is okay, but being sick is OKAY. One in four Americans has a mental illness, and it's not a shameful thing. It's a physical problem with your physical body. It's not a moral failing or a character flaw. Mental illness is a real, honest-to-goodness, illness.

(I should mention the other thing that I do with all of this is that I see a therapist every week, and not just a therapist, but a skills-based cognitive behavioral therapist who teaches me how to navigate my life. It's amazing! And there's nothing wrong with therapy! I think EVERYONE could benefit from therapy.)

Anyway, all of this to say: be nice to yourself. And if you're struggling, get help. Because there are real things that really help.

Fire in the Belly… It’s Back!

I've been telling everyone that I've been in retirement for the past five and a half years. I just haven't felt like writing. Previously on the blog I talked about how I write fulltime for a digital marketing agency, and that just kinda sapped the creativity out of me. I've described before I how just don't have "the fire in the belly" for writing that I used to have.

Well, I have been writing a LOT recently, and that fire is back.

Here's what I think was going on. I was just tired, and I was depressed. You can read this blog post about how depressed I have been and how new meds and therapy are getting me through it and it's been amazing. But the other big thing is that a whole bunch of my author years were stressful. From the period when I finished Dark Energy till when I cowrote The Warning, there was about four years in there where money was incredibly tight, I was incredibly sick, and writing was incredibly hard. And I just don't look back fondly on writing.

Even now, there's a whole lot about publishing that I don't like. The world is very different from when I published Variant in 2011, and it's VERY different from when I published On Second Thought in 2003.

When Variant came out, Twitter was brand new. Facebook was new. No one really had social media strategies. The closest thing I had was a blog tour, where my publicist at HarperCollins would set up interviews with book blogs. But now blogs aren't a thing at all (he says as he writes this blog...)

But when On Second Thought came out, my publisher wouldn't even let me include my website URL in my bio at the back because they didn't have an internet marketing strategy AT ALL, and were suspicious of me doing self promotion that they, the publisher, couldn't oversee.

It was a totally different world! So when I see authors making Reels and Stories and TikToks, I have no idea what I would ever do in that world. That, above all else, scares me away from publishing more than actually writing a book. I can't be a good writer and also a good TikTok'er. I'm just not built that way. (There are some authors who pull this off amazingly well, and there are some authors who just seem to be flailing in a desperate attempt to get people to buy their books--and I don't want to be the latter. I don't want anyone to watch me badly acting an unfunny skit on Instagram and them thinking "This Rob Wells sure is a shill.")

ANYWAY, the point of ALL of this is to say that I AM writing a book, and it's going really, really well, and the drafting process is going really, really fast. It reminds me a lot of writing Variant, which I drafted in eleven days. I'm not going that fast on this one, but I am three weeks in and at 50k words, which is pretty darn quick.

And I'm loving it, in a way that I didn't think I was capable of loving writing a book ever again.

There's a thing I used to say: "I don't know what I used to think about before I became a writer." And I didn't! Because, when you're a writer, you're always living in your head, thinking about the plot and the characters and the themes. Always. All the time. But when I wasn't writing fulltime I just kinda thought about... my day? Stuff? I've been depressed most of the time so I didn't do a lot of thinking at all.

But I'm living in my head again, and I'm loving it.

Here's the rub: I'm a plotter, but I've been pantsing this whole book. I started with a pretty solid outline, but 20k words into it I threw in a MASSIVE curveball--something that I had been saving for the final chapter as a twist--and it has shaken up the whole manuscript. And ever since then, I've just been makin' stuff up.

And for non-writers, you'll say "well don't writers always just make stuff up?" and yes, we do, but I've always had a plan, and now I don't have a plan. And this is not how I write books, at all, but it's how I'm writing this one--and it's fun!

It's gonna require SO much revision, though, because you can't just make stuff up for 50k words with no plan and have it make sense. I've got this character I love, who is a musician in the future (the book takes place in the 2140s) who is named Beast Fire, and I adore this character, but I also kinda forgot that he existed for about 20k words of the book and have just now brought him back. Where's he been? Who knows? Not me.

The point is that I have that "fire in the belly" back again, and I really love it. Will this book ever be published? I don't know, because 1) I'm out of practice and it might not be good, and 2) publishing is never guaranteed no matter what, and 3) YA science fiction is not a hot genre at the moment. And folks, I may have the fire in the belly for writing again, but I don't think I'll ever have the fire in the belly for self-publishing. I respect the heck out of self-publishers, but I do not have the mental bandwidth for being a microbusiness. I just want to write books and have someone else shepherd them through the editing/cover design/marketing/distribution pipeline.

So we'll see. I want people to read this thing, because I love it and I think that my readers--especially those who loved Dark Energy--will really like this one. But we'll see.

For now I'm just having fun.

Not Just Good - It’s Great Depression

I talk about my depression a lot, but that’s because depression is really the main thing that I do these days. It eats up so much of my life that it is an ever-present entity that requires my time and obedience:

• When I wake up in the morning I know that I’ll feel good for a certain amount of time where my brain will function normally and so I MUST make good use of that time. Therefore, I cram as much into that time as I can, waking up as early as 4:00am to have more of it.

• When I go to the gas station every morning (this is a thing that was recommended by my therapist and no I will not be answering questions) I get my morning Diet Coke knowing that I need to time the consumption of that Coke efficiently and strictly so that it lasts until

• 3:00pm, when I go to the gas station a second time, marking the second half of the day, knowing that I need this round of Diet Coke to last me till bedtime. Because

• Then I get in bed. At like 3:10pm. And my new med routine is miraculously giving me back some productivity in these afternoon and evening hours, but that productivity is found in bed on a notebook or a laptop.

I don’t like that I am so beholden to the plague of depression, but it has me in its clutches and it is fierce. I tell ya, I have schizophrenia and I have hallucinated some scary stuff, but I will take hallucinations over depression any day. Depression is debilitating and awful.

And this is me talking at the PEAK of when depression is good! I’m currently doing better with depression than I have in the last three years.

Here’s the problem that we’ve been facing: my schizophrenia has been miraculously cured (effectively medicated) for the last five and a half years. And getting that medication balanced so perfectly as to remove all hallucinations and delusions COMPLETELY is so astoundingly unlikely that my psychiatrist has been loathe to change any of my medicines, even when my depression started getting bad.

So we turned to things like the Coke thing (which is all about establishing routines and timetables to motivate me through the day) and I’ve been in therapy for a long time getting all the brain help I can get.

But man, depression.

The current regimen changed the timing of one of my meds, splitting a large morning dose into a smaller morning and afternoon dose, with the theory that I was metabolizing it too quickly leading to my downturn in the evenings. The second change was to add a stimulant that I take both in the morning and at night, because if I can’t get non-depressed, at least I can have more energy.

And it’s bought me 2.5 - 3 hours more productivity in the day, which is AMAZING. I can’t complain, but sometimes I still do.

This is still early. I’ve only been doing this less than two months. But it’s a breath of fresh air.

Seriously, I can’t even remember what it would be like to have a normal brain.

Coming Out of Retirement

Astute readers will note that my last book came out in 2019 which was, like, a long time ago. Before that I was publishing (almost) yearly. So what have I been up to?

Well, I’ve been calling it semi-retirement. I got a fulltime job after six years of writing fulltime because as much as I loved the freedom of calling myself a real honest-to-goodness successful author, I also never had the financial stability I wanted. And I honestly will trade annual publishing in exchange for a steady paycheck and health insurance any day of the week.

The problem is that the fulltime job is also as a writer—just as a different kind of writer. I work for an internet marketing company and I write content for other companies’ websites and emails. It’s not exciting (my personal specialty is in roofing and plastic surgery), but it pays the bills in a way that writing books never did. (ie: reliably.) Anyway, the problem is that when I’m writing all day for the day job, I don’t have a ton of creative stamina to write after hours for books. So I haven’t been writing.

Add to this the fact that I am mentally ill and that I have been suffering for the past three years from terrific depression. (To be clear, I’ve been suffering for the last fifteen years from depression, but the last three years have been debilitating.)

BUT: about five weeks ago (end of July 2024) my psychiatrist made a change to my meds that has done the following:

• Bought me three more hours of productivity in the day. Previously the depression essentially put me in bed at 3pm every day. It still does put me in bed, but I’ve found I have the willpower to gut through the depression and work three more hours on my laptop or in a notebook.

• Made me not sad all the time. Which, you know, is great.

ALL OF THIS TO SAY:

I’m kinda working on a book???

It’s still in the early stages, but I’m really loving the process of creative writing again. I am completely out of the loop on the market, so trying to step back in and pick up where I left off is daunting. The YA market is not what it was when I left it.

For starters, I write science fiction, not fantasy, and YA sci-fi just doesn’t sell like it used to. My whole career was built on the shoulders of The Hunger Games—my books were often called dystopian even though they weren’t really dystopian. I always referred to them as modern day young adult with a science fiction twist: you know, androids and bioweapons.

The book that I work on doesn’t fit this mold exactly, but it certainly isn’t middle grade fantasy, which seems to be all the rage.

My current project, temporarily titled “Failure to Thrive”, takes place 100 (or so) years in the future. There is an international science fair kind of thing called the Junior Genius Grant, and the book starts with Maeve, our main character, and her team landing a top spot and winning a trip for an internship on a Mars colony. But when they get there, things start to go very wrong.

Will it be published? I have no idea. But I’m writing again and it feels good. I’m 28k words into it and haven’t gotten nearly far enough in the story. This thing is going to be long (for a YA), or, in other words, it’s going to need a ton of revisions. But that’s okay. I like revisions.

Anyway, it’s good to be writing again. And, if all goes well, this book will eventually make it into your hands.