Chuck Wendig is a well-known screenwriter and a novelist and is also the game designer of the popular game – Hunder: Game of the Vigil. He has authored several series of books, most popular being – Miriam Black, The Heartland Trilogy, The Star Wars, Mookie Pearl, Atlanta Burns, Heartland YA, Blue Blazes, Dinocalypse Trilogy and is also known for his screen writing for This Guy, SmallSmall Thing (2013) and Pandemic (2011) along with other works in comics, games genre with him already having contributed over 2 million words to this industry. He was also a finalist of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the cowriter of the Emmy-nominated storyline Collapsus. He is also writes his popular blog, terribleminds.com. He was a member in the ‘Sundanc’e Film Festival Screenwriter’s Lab in 2010 along with his writing co-writer Lance Weiler to represent Pandemic. He currently resides among the nature trails ofPennsyltucky with his wife, son and red dog. He works with Stacia Decker of the Donald Mass Literary Agency.
Books:
He has a penchant for writing in Science fiction and Fantasy thrillers category. One of his most popular books in the Miriam Black series is the first novel titled – Blackbirds. Through this novel, he introduced his famous character of Miriam Black. This book character is a female protagonist and has a special psychological power of visualizing of a person’s death by the mere ability of touch of skin. A small excerpt from the book summarizing the plot is –“Miriam Black knows the how of your peril. This makes her daily life a living hell, especially when you can’t do anything about it, or stop trying to. She’s foreknown numerous of car smashes, heart strokes and attacks, recklessness and suicides. By just a touch of a hand or leg or even a finger with any person and she is able to prophesize and when your final moments will occur. Miriam has given up trying to save people; that only makes their deaths happen. But then she asks for a favor of a ride from Louis Darling and by a welcome handshake she sees in thirty days that Louis is going to be killed and he calls “Miriam” while dying. She can understand the cause of death of Louis, and Miriam is going to be the next casualty. She cannot escape this future and cannot do anything to stop this, but Miriam still dares to challenge it and takes a steps to curb. Will she succeed?”
This book has created a large fan base of the author in fantasy and crime mystery and also in Paranormal and psychics section. There is some section of renders in this genre who have mixed reviews for it as well owing to the fact that the content has a lot of violence and brutality and the writing style is a dark narrative with black comedy. The book also offers a bit of supernatural horror along with the natural flow of crime thriller style story telling format. Like this Chuck has very successfully created and magnified various book characters for e.g. Mookie of the Mookie pearl fame, Cael McAvoy in The Heartland Trilogy and many more. His distinguished style of writing, and bold experimentation with the writing content, the choice of words and tight story writing has made this author quite favorite of many a readers.
Another of his famous novels is the star wars series book – Aftermath which has also been used as screenplay for the movie by the same name – “Star Wars – AfterMath”. This is a science fantasy fiction that is set between Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi in 1983 and Star Wars: Episode VII the Force Awakens. This novel is first in the trilogy -Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakenspublishing. In Chuck’s words “he was bursting with girlish joy when he came to know that he had been chosen to write the sequel of this extremely popular series.
Aftermath reveals the beginnings of a new administration post the Empire’s defeat in theBattle of Endor, and features favorite characters from the Star Wars films. It was released on September 4, 2015. The author here describes the current states of the Empire and Rebel Alliance with new and exciting characters. The writing is crisp and give a visualization of this unexplored space.
Readers’ response to book Aftermath is mixed. One of the many popular critic review had been that –while “it wasn’t as abysmal as other reviewers made it out to be” and the character of Admiral Sloane was widely appreciated by many. In another critical review of the book, many readers feel that there are too many new characters introduced which becomes a little heavy for the reader to absorb in the narrative. This also distracts from connect with the story. The familiar characters are mentioned in the book in a very limited content which are a severe disappointment to the masses.
He has also experimented with humorous and reference writing with his another famous novel – “250 Things You Should Know About Writing”. Chuck Wending provides creative and honest career advice to the aspiring writers around the world and due to its light and humorous writing style has become quite popular. Chuck Wendig provides insights on 11 writing topics with 25 approx. inputs on each-
The list of topics covered are:
– Being a Writer
– Writing a Novel
– Storytelling
– Character
– Plot
– Dialogue
– Description
– Editing, Revising, Rewriting
– Getting Published
– Writing a Sentence
– Writing a Screenplay
The author covers the topics in flair with the touch of being informative and a crude sense of humor for which his blog posts are famous for. The writing advice is non-revolutionary but fundamental and can serve as basic practical guideline for writing commercial fictions and also serves as an interesting read for its high entertainment value. Although, Chuck’s sense of humor is wry and usually includes profanity and also politically incorrect statements sometimes, his fan base is loyal and are the ones who do not get easily offended.
Another of his literary writing advice books are “five hundred ways to be a better writer”, “The Kick-Ass Writer: 1001 Ways to Write Great Fiction, Get Published, and Earn Your Audience”, “Confessions of a Freelance Penmonkey” etc., the last one being the collections of his hilarious blog posts on writing experiences. The Kick-Ass writer was e-book published by the Writer’s Digest.
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