Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 109

Yoon Ha Lee: Five Things I Learned Writing Ninefox Gambit

To win an impossible war Captain Kel Cheris must awaken an ancient weapon and a despised traitor general.

Captain Kel Cheris of the hexarchate is disgraced for using unconventional methods in a battle against heretics.  Kel Command gives her the opportunity to redeem herself by retaking the Fortress of Scattered Needles, a star fortress that has recently been captured by heretics.  Cheris’s career isn’t the only thing at stake.  If the fortress falls, the hexarchate itself might be next.

Cheris’s best hope is to ally with the undead tactician Shuos Jedao. The good news is that Jedao has never lost a battle, and he may be the only one who can figure out how to successfully besiege the fortress.

The bad news is that Jedao went mad in his first life and massacred two armies, one of them his own.  As the siege wears on, Cheris must decide how far she can trust Jedao–because she might be his next victim.

* * *

Be able to summarize the idea in one sentence.

Once upon a time, during my *previous* attempt to write a novel, someone at a convention asked me what it was about. I hemmed and hawed and tried to figure out how to explain the three braided plot strands and the battles and the steam cannon and the *things* and eventually emerged with a sad, unhelpful, “It’s complicated.”

What I have learned since then is that “It’s complicated” is a symptom that something is whackadoodle with the structure. _Ninefox Gambit_ takes place in a complicated *world*, but I always had a crystal-clear idea of what the story was about: the battle of wits between a disgraced captain and her undead advisor, a brilliant tactician and mass murderer who might be out to kill her next. That character dynamic is the backbone of the entire novel.

Writing is about math.

No, really! I’m not just saying that because I majored in math. One of the most valuable lessons I learned from integral calculus is that even infinitesimals may yet sum up to something big. The non-calculus writing-relevant version of this is that if you write every day, even a little bit, that all adds up. And the flip side is that if you write zero words, your wordcount doesn’t advance.

Now, sometimes you have to take days off because your kid is sick, or you’re working out that worldbuilding bit in the middle of chapter 7. That’s fine too! But if there is a *habit* of zero-word days, that novel isn’t going to write itself. (Trust me, if I knew a magic way of making novels write themselves, I wouldn’t just be doing it, I would be working as a consultant to writers and getting rich doing *that*.)

Don’t be afraid to revise.

This novel went through six drafts. A whole lot of things in the rough draft didn’t make it to the final one, including the ill-advised scene with the slaughter of geese. (Fear not, goose-lovers; geese are still mentioned. SPACE GOOSE!)

Once in a while I run into someone who’s familiar with my short fiction and who thinks things come out perfectly on the first try. One, that’s very flattering (God knows, the short fiction isn’t perfect either), and two, that’s only because they haven’t seen my rough drafts. Most of my rough drafts are laugh-out-loud terrible.

I’ve heard that some writers prefer drafting and some prefer revisions. I belong firmly to the revisions side. Generating words is painful! But I find it easier to revise words that exist than to bring into being words that didn’t use to exist. No matter how awful a rough draft is, I can always make it better, especially with the help of betas.

Pay attention to the beta readers, but don’t lose sight of the magic.

This novel benefited tremendously from a number of beta readers. One of them in particular, Daedala, helped me grapple with structure. I’m mostly used to short stories so figuring out how to scale up and handle the emotional beats and so on was an interesting challenge.

On the other hand, sometimes the beta readers have suggestions that might make the book a better book, but a *different* better book than the one you wanted to write. In this case, one beta reader suggested deleting Jedao’s massacre from his backstory. The novel that would have resulted would possibly have been a good book. But it also would have killed the point of writing it in the first place. I had a whole scheme that the massacre fit into, and I was willing to fix things around it, but not to remove one of the keystones of the plot that made it exciting to write in the first place.

Ergonomics, ergonomics, ergonomics.

I wrote large portions of _Ninefox Gambit_ with a fountain pen (either a Webster Four-Star or a Waterman 52V–if you pay attention you may see my acknowledgment to the Waterman in the story!). This was one of the better decisions I made, although it was a complete coincidence. As it turns out, writing properly with a fountain pen is easy on the wrists, and even writing not-quite-properly is helpful. And bonus, because I used about ten zillion different colors of ink, the rough draft looks like My Little Pony vomit!

Eventually, though, I had to type the whole shebang into Scrivener. I do use an ergonomic keyboard (a Kinesis Advantage, which I love but has a learning curve), but in the white-hot heat of *please let this novel be done* in the last two days, I think I typed something like 8,000 words/day both days.

I ended up in the doctor’s office a week later with pain in my wrists because I had given myself arthritis from typing too much, too fast. Don’t let this be you! And it could have been so much worse. These days, I try to do typing with the Kinesis, but I’m using a standing desk and I also make a point of quitting or taking breaks if my wrists start to twinge, or just taking breaks frequently, period. Write, yes, but write healthily!

* * *

 A Korean-American sf/f writer who majored in math, Yoon finds it a source of continual delight that math can be mined for story ideas. Yoon’s fiction has appeared in publications such as F&SF, Tor.com, and Clarkesworld Magazine, as well as several year’s best anthologies.

Yoon Ha Lee: Website | Twitter

Ninefox Gambit: Amazon | Rebellion Store

Cassandra Khaw: Vexed About Voice

Cassandra Khaw went for a bit of a tear on Twitter about voice in one’s writing — and how every writer has a different feel to a voice, but also how a lot of advice tries to sand that down so we all write the same. She’s right to be vexed by that, and so when she wrote a guest post on that very vexation, well, c’mon. It’s too good not to post. (And as you’ll see below, she’s also too good a writer to ignore…)

* * *

Voice.

I got angry about a picture a few weeks ago. This one, to be specific.

Now, there’s nothing ostensibly wrong about that advice, and it does drive its point home by being an ugly sentence, full of unnecessary words, and utterly devoid of music. Taken objectively, it’s good advice, especially for new writers who are fresh to the fray.

So, why was I so vexed?

Because of how the writer’s group responded to it. There’s a tangible aura of scorn, I suppose, for anyone who dips into the purple territory, for anything that doesn’t involve the most efficient language. Hell, I remember one guy declaring that ornate writing prevents you from being published. For anyone already in the industry, it’d simply be an opinion, to be discarded or internalized as necessary. But in a community with young writers, new writers? Writers who haven’t yet developed the confidence to put themselves out there? Writers who have not discovered if their prose is closer to poetry, or if a love for mathematical equations might permeate their words?

That’s dangerous.

Voice.

Voice is interesting. Voice isn’t just your go-to vocabulary, your understanding of grammatical structure, your knowledge of rhythm. Voice is more ambiguous, more ethereal. I’ve never quite figured out how to categorize it. But it is that thing that makes you you, even when someone else has channeled your style. It is an echo of your soul, your thoughts, a piece of you that strings itself through your words, immortalized in the cadence of your paragraphs, the poetry of your observations.

It is a precious thing that can take years to cultivate, years to develop. It’s something that never really quits growing either. It is unique to you, and only you, and it is the thing that makes a piece of writing sing. (Because, you know, voice and song and the collaboration between larynx and music — I’ll stop now.)

And here’s the point I’m trying to make: voices can be silenced. It’s no secret that writing can be an incredibly raw act. The decision to put yourself out there for public scrutiny? That’s a terrifying choice to make. Now, imagine being that afraid and being told, “Hey, by the way? People aren’t going to like you.”

Now. This shouldn’t be conflated with good critique. (There’s an entire post to be written about bad critique, especially when it’s fueled by negative emotion.) Critique can be fantastic. But it’s a different thing entirely when someone else is trying to police your technique. Sure, everyone needs a foundation. Give that new writer a book to read, a piece of advice to follow, a set of guidelines to look over? But tell them also: This is what people say, but this isn’t what you have to do.

After that? Get out of the way.

Because you don’t need to be there when the author is developing their voice, not unless you’re specifically asked to be. You don’t need to influence them. They can decide who influences them. They can choose to call up a little bit of Lewis Carroll, pair it with a glimmer of Anne Leckie. They can decide if they want to be inspired by Brooklyn hip-hop, or if they want to lace it with the patois of their own history.

And if they’re allowed to do this, if they’re given time to grow, the results can be so beautiful. Look at this excerpt from Peter Watts’ The Things.

It was malformed and incomplete, but its essentials were clear enough. It looked like a great wrinkled tumor, like cellular competition gone wild—as though the very processes that defined life had somehow turned against it instead. It was obscenely vascularised; it must have consumed oxygen and nutrients far out of proportion to its mass. I could not see how anything like that could even exist, how it could have reached that size without being outcompeted by more efficient morphologies.

Nor could I imagine what it did. But then I began to look with new eyes at these offshoots, these biped shapes my own cells had so scrupulously and unthinkingly copied when they reshaped me for this world. Unused to inventory—why catalog body parts that only turn into other things at the slightest provocation?—I really saw, for the first time, that swollen structure atop each body. So much larger than it should be: a bony hemisphere into which a million ganglionic interfaces could fit with room to spare. Every offshoot had one. Each piece of biomass carried one of these huge twisted clots of tissue.

Don’t read it in a gulp. Breathe it in. It is dense. Watts’ retelling of The Thing pulls from his scientific background, uses terminology that others would shy from. Vascularised. Morphologies. Ganglionic. Not necessarily difficult words, but words that layer into the density of his writing, which requires patience and a willing to scavenge for meaning in the jargon. But so rewarding for it. This is clearly what it is, what it should be: a scientist’s voice.

And now, an excerpt from Catherynne Valente’s The Lily and the Horn.

My daughter and I fetch knives and buckets and descend the stairs into the underworld beneath our home. Laburnum Castle is a mushroom lying only half above ground. Her lacy, lovely parts reach up toward the sun, but the better part of her dark body stretches out through the seastone caverns below, vast rooms and chambers and vaults with ceilings more lovely than any painted chapel in Mother-of-Millions, shot through with frescoes and motifs of copper and quartz and sapphire and opal. Down here, the real work of war clangs and thuds and corkscrews toward tonight. Smells as rich as brocade hang in the kitchens like banners, knives flash out of the mist and the shadows.

I have chosen the menu of our war as carefully as the stones in my hair. All my art has bent upon it. I chose the wines for their color—nearly black, thick and bitter and sharp. I baked the bread to be as sweet as the pudding. The vital thing, as any wife can tell you, is spice. Each dish must taste vibrant, strong, vicious with flavor. Under my eaves they will dine on curried doves, black pepper and peacock marrow soup, blancmange drunk with clove and fiery sumac, sealmeat and fennel pies swimming in garlic and apricots, roast suckling lion in a sauce of brandy, ginger, and pink chilis, and pomegranate cakes soaked in claret.

Less complex language, but no less intricate. Common wisdom suggests that you should show and not tell, that a feast can and should be quickly encapsulated in a few lines, instead of explained to a fine detail. But this story is so much richer because Valente ignores that rule, and instead allows us to taste, feel, and experience every nuance of the world.

Of course, you don’t need to be bombastic to have beautiful writing. Seth Dickinson’s writing is sharp, economical. It is poetic, certainly, but one that has been mapped out to a letter, ruthlessly clean. From his recent Laws of Night and Silk:

Warlord Absu wears black beneath a mantle of red, the colors of flesh and war. For a decade she has led the defense of the highlands. For a decade before that—well: Kavian was not born with sisters, but she has one. This loyalty is burnt into her. Absu is the pole where Kavian’s needle points.

“Lord of hosts,” Kavian murmurs. She’s nervous tonight, so she bows deep. The warlord considers her in brief, silent reserve.

“Tonight we will bind you to a terrible duty. The two mature abnarchs are our only hope.” Her eyes! Kavian remembers their ferocity, but never remembers it. She is so intent: “You’re our finest. But one error could destroy us.”

And Malon Edwards’ writing? The Half Dark Promise is an absolute triumph, one that does not rewrite its core to fit everyone. It uses words and sentence structures that are uniquely its own. It doesn’t pause to explain every word, like what we’re often told to do, to provide English translations for foreign words. And that decision makes this story all the more powerful.

I was surprised on the first day of school when Bobby took my hand on our walk home. He was nervous. He flushed rose-red down to his neck. But he didn’t let go. He’d signed the half dark promise just like every other timoun in Chicago. Even lekòl segondè elèv yo with their teenage swagger and their foul mouths held hands on the walk home. Bobby’s hand was sweaty. Large. Callused. The hands of a smith’s son. But I didn’t mind. Vrèman vre—truth be told—I was just pleased Bobby wasn’t calling me names while speaking to me. That didn’t happen at my old school. Actually, that didn’t happen at my new school, either.

I could give you a thousand examples, point you to a hundred more writers, each completely different from the next. My own work is influenced by my native tongues, my national background. Hokkien is tonal and I look to find a kind of music in words. I think also in smells, tastes, regardless of whether they’re foul or delicious. Here’s an excerpt from my upcoming novella Hammers on Bone.

“Yeah?” I champ at my cigarette, bouncing it from one corner of my mouth to the other. There’s a pervasive smell in the hallway. Not quite a stench, but something unpleasant. Like the remnants of a molly party, or old sex left to crust on skin. “What about his old man? He working the kid? That why your son isn’t showing up at school?”

The broad twitches, shoulders scissoring back, spine contracting. It’s a tiny motion, one of those blink-and-you-lose-it tells but oh, do I catch it. “My fiance doesn’t involve our sons in hard labor.”

“Uh huh.” I rap ash from my cigarette and grin like the devil come to dine on Georgia. “Mind if I look around?”

‘Old sex left to crust on skin.’ I’ve had beta readers tell me that the description turned their stomachs, concise as it is.

And honestly, when you get right down to it, There is no one shape for writing to take, no singular form that is better than any other. Voice is unique, and voices need room to exist.

Let them grow.

You don’t want to miss seeing what they could be.

* * *

Cassandra Khaw is a London-based writer who still has her roots buried deep in Southeast Asia where there are sometimes more ghosts than people. Her work tends to revolve around intersectional cultures, mythological mash-ups, and bizarre urban architecture. When not embroiled in fiction, she writes about technology and video games for a variety of places including RockPaperShotgun and Ars Technica UK.

Offerings of fluffy things are always welcomed.

Cassandra Khaw: Website | Twitter

Recipe For A Shooting

It begins with men. Young men, usually.

(This is a recipe that simmers a long time on the stove.)

You teach them that the world was made for them. That they own it and can do what they want and take what they desire. You also teach them that they are not allowed to express themselves. Doing that is to be like a woman, and men are told that they are very explicitly not women. Men own everything, remember. It is their right to own and to want and to take. Women are lesser, for they do not own the world. So to be like a woman — to cry and to manifest other feelings — is to be lesser. It’s not that they don’t have feelings. It is that they are taught to keep them inside. In boxes and bottles. In lead-lined trunks locked tight lest they ever escape.

We call them names if they fail this test. Thee names are slurs, and these names serve two purposes: one, it limits the victim and course-corrects them away from them being able to express themselves; two, it conveniently also reduces an entire other segment of the population and treats them as lesser. These names summarize women as their body parts, and associate men with them. These names tell us too that LGBT is lesser, weaker — gay men are really just women. Do not be like these things, we say. Or we (the other men) will call you out. We will bully you. We will hurt you. To make you better, because men are good at pain, we explain.

Giving pain. Receiving pain. Never ever revealing pain.

These slurs continue across the board, actually. If you’re lazy, you’re this group. If you’re dumb, you’re that group. If you’re a criminal, you’re like another group. And it all has the very special effect of reminding the young man that he is the most special of them all, and the only way he limits his specialness is by being not-a-man, and quite likely, not white. We have built a fence for him cobbled together of insults aimed at other people. Stay in the fence and be a man. Do not stray and we will not punish you.

Inside the fence is a too-small pasture. So little space to roam. Like with animals, the less space you have, the more agitated you become. Chickens pecking each other apart. Dogs wearing the skin off their neck from a choking chain and collar. But the fence is the man’s identity and with it, we limit his freedoms to be anything other than a pure young man, even though to limit an animal’s freedom is to drive it slowly mad. (But don’t worry, we won’t give you the mental health care you need when you have been driven to the brink. Men don’t need care, remember. Men are good at pain. Bottle it up. Don’t let it out, don’t you dare let it out.)

But the fence is the fence.

We force them to understand that they are MEN. They are MASCULINE. They are aggressive, dominant, alpha. They must be or they are weak. Big dick. Big muscles. Hot girlfriend. Prove your manhood. Wear it as an emblem. Just in case, we can make sure it’s driven home in the toy aisle, too. Make sure they play with guns and weapons of war (while at the same time limiting a young girl’s social ability to do so). Do not let them be nurturers. No dolls for the men. Men are soldiers, generals, builders, leaders. Trucks and cars. Guns and swords. But they also learn by limitation — the girls have their own aisles. They have not only dolls, but stuffed animals. They have little toy shopping carts and hair salons. They cook. They clean. They are soft like the stuffed animals. Not hard like guns. No Black Widow toys for the girls or for the boys. Even if the world gives us Ghostbusters who are women, let’s make sure that the packaging shows boys — lest they be made to believe they aren’t special, they aren’t the best, they aren’t chosen.

You’re trapped, but you’re special. Boys will be boys. It isn’t rape because she wanted it. We excuse the worst because it fits the story. We discourage anything that doesn’t fit the story.

Fences, fences, so many fences. Do not stray, we say. Do not stray.

We have reminded them not-so-subtly that everyone is different in the wrong way, and to be different is to be weak. We have reminded them that they own the world, but now they’re entering a world where the fact of that seems in dispute. Young men are not even the dominant majority, and yet, they are told they are, anyway. The world seems out to prove them wrong: women do not just fling themselves at men, after all. And for white men, it’s even more troubling, because they were sold a 1950s bill-of-sale — they were sold a group of Founding Fathers who look like them, who made this country with manhood and muskets and destiny.

And now the world isn’t that. It looks different. It feels different. And we have told them all along that they are the best, the most special, the most beautiful snowflake — no, wait, I didn’t say beautiful, I meant virile, I meant tough, I meant manly. The most manliest big-dickenist snowflake ever. Not even a snowflake, because snowflakes are fragile. They melt. They weep. No — men are special like throwing stars, like grenades going off, like the puckered hole carved into the top of a hollowpoint bullet.

To help them deal, to explain this new world, we give them enemies.

You cannot get a job because of that group.

You cannot just take what you want because of this other group.

You don’t make enough money or have the nice house because of them.

These groups want to limit how special we know you are. The group changes. It needn’t be just one. As time goes on, we switch enemies on them. Just to keep it interesting. Just to remind them that the whole world is against them because the world has forgotten how special they are.

And so when we tell these young men — young white men, usually — about feminism, or about how black lives matter, or how there are men who want to love other men and (gasp) get married to them, they short circuit. They hemorrhage. That doesn’t fit the narrative. Young white men are the best. Feminism recenters that conversation. BLM recenters that conversation. LGBT rights recenter that conversation. It paints for them a world where all is not a mountain and they are not at the top of it — it paints a flat plane where everyone is equal and all have a chance to breathe the same oxygen. It is a crack in the veneer and the young man must ask how true the narrative has been. Feminism says little to nothing about men. BLM says nothing about whiteness. LGBT says nothing about straightness. And yet, how can that be? The young, white, straight man is so special, though. Why do these groups so bitterly ignore that?

It’s fine, though. We will keep reminding him that the narrative is true even if the rest of the world doesn’t see it or resemble it. And we will have politicians and media who drive that home again and again. Congress is mostly men, and mostly white. The media is mostly men, and mostly white. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of mostly men, and those are mostly white. And we say to them, see? Look, these are your idols. This is the pattern. Here is the narrative. If you don’t fit it, it’s not your fault. Someone is keeping you away. It’s those people who want to blow you up. It’s those people who want to take your jobs. It’s those people who want to take away your manhood and make you like a woman. These are your enemies.

They are standing in your way.

They are not of your tribe. Your special, precious tribe.

If we need to, we can always add a dose of old-timey religion. And that adjective, old-timey, is key. Religion is not a poison, but the old ways of it cleave to a world where men are its center, where God Himself is a man and women are cattle. The laws and commandments of each religion are for your tribe only. Not for ‘them’ over there. The old-timey religion reinforces the narrative. And it repaints the enemy not just as one that is biological or cultural, but one that is spiritual. And so your crusade against the enemy is sanctified. It is holy. The Man God told you that it is, and it is kill or be killed. The things that make men as men are not sins. The fence is now built of religion. Outside the fence are the women and the queers and the heathens. They are sinners. You are pure. All you do is pure. The Man God has pre-empted you with forgiveness, he has built you of Himself and those who are not like you are not like Him. Do what thou wilt.

Politicians seize on this, too. They enact legislation that never says, but always reminds, that the men — the white men, the straight men — are so very special. We bake the identification of our enemies into our laws, and we braid in that old-timey religion to make sure that it’s all sweetened by the sanctity of a divinely-driven message. We say, these bathrooms are for you and not for anybody else. We say, this marriage is for you and not for anybody else. This job. These benefits. This life. It’s all for you, Damien, all for you. God says it. Our laws say it. And that document made of God and Man, the Constitution, says it, too. (Never mind the fact that the Constitution is just a piece of paper written by men of dubious religiousness who meant for our laws to be ever-amendable and totally elastic — that narrative must change, for you are a young man living in a country blessed by the Man God, and so that means the Constitution is as iron-clad as the Bible itself, as long as you don’t mind sanding down the rough and disagreeable parts for your own convenience.)

So, now we’ve got men of all ages. White men and straight men, too, in that pack. And we teach them that they must be manly men, and that the world is against them, and that their failures are the fault of enemies at the gates, enemies who want to besiege them and de-center them. The ingredients are in the pot, now. Been simmering and slow-cooking for days, years, centuries.

But to really make this soup pop, you gotta get it hot.

So we add some gunpowder to it.

Real gunpowder. And with it, real guns.

We say, look at those enemies. They’re trying to take away what’s rightly yours. And that anger the man feels, we conveniently don’t acknowledge that the anger is something we put in there — because we built for them a very tall fence around a very small pasture and now the men are traumatized and clawing at themselves because they can’t cry or they can’t nurture or they can’t love who maybe they really want to love. They’re like pressure-cooker bombs — their metal exterior denting and bulging like a botulism can at all the toxic shit trying to get out but goddamnit we just can’t let it out gotta keep it in gotta 

Here, have a gun.

No, no, it’s okay.

It’s easy to get one.

It’s not just easy, it’s part of who we are, we say. It’s baked into the Constitution. Never mind that the Constitution was written by men who had muskets which took about, oh, three years to load and fire. Never mind that the guns we have today are concealable and have bits of lead that travel hundreds or even thousands of feet per second and that they can discharge these little angry metal wasps at an alarming rate of however fast your finger can twitch. We say, it’s right there. In this holy, God-sacred document that governs our nation. And just so nobody gets any fancy ideas we remind them that this document is unswerving, unchanging, etched not just in stone but in our God Damn DNA — and we lionize the Founding Fathers and their AR-15s even though they made a document meant to change, a document written for a time over two centuries ago when it is safe to say that things were just a little bit different.

We make sure that the men can have as many guns as they want, as easily as they want them. It’s harder to get a driver’s license. You don’t need training. You don’t need insurance. You only need a cursory background check, and that’s only if you buy it certain ways. Any little change to that is the slipperiest of slopes, a slope slick with your future blood, young man. They try to modify anything about your right, and you might as well just put on a dress and start kissing some other religion’s god. Doesn’t matter how sensible it is. You’re special, remember. Sense has nothing to do with it. This is manifest destiny. This is manhood’s destiny.

You’re special.

Those people aren’t like you.

They’re your enemy.

You get to have what you want.

You get to do what you want, take what you want.

(Nobody will do anything to stop you anyway.)

Just don’t cry. Don’t feel. Bottle it all up.

God says it’s okay.

The law says it’s okay.

Long as you’re a man, a manly man, not a pussy, not a queer.

Here, now. Have your gun. Go on, take it.

Don’t use it, of course.

Wink, wink.

Don’t use it.

Don’t stray.

Those are your enemies.

Here is your gun.

Invasive And Zer0es Giveaway

At Tor.com, you can snag a copy of Zer0es and an early copy of Invasive.

You can do so by clicking right here and leaving a comment at the Tor site.

If you have not read the starred Kirkus Review of Invasive:

After the events of the last novel, FBI Agent Hollis Copper is understandably spooked by a world that’s becoming increasingly threatened by expanding technology. To help him push back against the things going bump in the night, he’s seconded futurist Hannah Stander to his department to help shine a light on bleeding-edge tech gone awry. She’s suitably intrigued when he calls her with a dilemma: “I’ve got a cabin on the lake with more than a thousand dead bodies in it….Think of it like a riddle.” What she finds in rural New York is a dead man with no skin, surrounded by hundreds of dead ants. Hannah’s investigation leads her to Ez Choi, a punk-rock Asian-American entomologist. Ez discovers that the ants weren’t just unleashed, but engineered, and they bear the same genetic markers employed by biotech billionaire Einar Geirsson, a reclusive Icelandic billionaire operating a secret biotech lab off the coast of Hawaii. If the setup sounds very Crichton-esque, it is, but Wendig puts his own stamp on this propulsive techno-thriller with his signature action set pieces, a deeply damaged heroine, and a pervasive threat that will give all but the most hardened readers the creepy-crawlies. The book makes some very salient points about the ethics of genetic engineering but doesn’t forego action as the book culminates in a biological catastrophe, not to mention a deadly cat-and-mouse chase on the treacherous Kalalau Trail on the North Shore of Kauai. Hannah Stander is a standout heroine—raised by survivalists and gifted with an unparalleled ability for predictive analysis. Think Thomas Harris’ Will Graham and Clarice Starling rolled into one and pitched on the knife’s edge of a scenario that makes Jurassic Park look like a carnival ride.

Another rip-roaring, deeply paranoid thriller about the reasons to fear the future.

The contest runs until 6/14.

Enjoy, and thanks to Harper and Tor!

Flash Fiction Challenge: Knock Knock, Who’s There?

Today’s challenge: write a piece of flash fiction that begins with a visitor at the door. A guest. Or a villain. Or something altogether stranger. Any genre will do. But someone is at the door.

Who? Why? For what purpose?

Length: 1000 words-ish

Due by: Friday, June 17th, noon EST.

Post at your online space, drop a comment here.

Knock, knock. Who’s there?

I’m With Her

It’s a big day. I don’t have adequate words to express how big — but this country just told its daughters what other nations before it have said: you can go all the way to the top. You can be a nominee for president and soon, I believe, the president proper, because I’m with Hillary Clinton. She’s got my vote in the general, which admittedly may sound like faint praise given her opponent. Honestly, a lawn chair would have my vote. I’d vote for a bowling ball covered in dog shit and pubic hair before I vote for Trump. But even if the GOP had a more-human, less-lotion-soaked-Hitler-merkin on their side, I’d still be voting for Hillary Clinton. I think she’s a strong leader. I think she’s done a lot for this country and for the world through charity. I think she’s smart, savvy, a good speaker. I think she understands compromise and coalitions. I’m proud to have her as our candidate. She is easily one of the most qualified candidates we’ve ever had, given the number of roles she’s occupied. And she’s been vetted left and right, often by Republicans wanting to knock her back every time she blinks funny. Little did they know, they were just toughening up her chitinous exoskeleton. None of the scandals stuck. Their messaging failed to prevent her candidacy. She’s still here, and I’m with her, and I hope you are, too.

(If you wonder just what the fuck she’s done, well, I got a website for you.)

It’s funny, I remember in the 90s that HRC was accused of being too progressive — some liberal lawyer who wanted to ruin America with her BASICALLY COMMUNIST values. And now we’ve gone the other way with it, where we worry that she doesn’t pass the progressive purity test. And as a women, she faces criticism that men generally don’t or won’t get. Certainly there’s a vanity to politics, but she seems to catch more heat for whether she smiles or doesn’t smile, whether she’s too loud or not loud enough, whether she wears clothes appropriate enough (too dowdy, too matronly, too expensive, too mannish). The fact she persevered in both 2008 and now again eight years later is pretty amazing all by itself. She’s earned so far the lion’s share of the popular vote — 15.5 million people is no small scratch.

Also she did an episode of Broad City, which in my mind is good as gold.

GOLD, PEOPLE. PRECIOUS GOLD. Because seriously, Broad City.

I recognize she is not the perfect candidate, but the perfect is the enemy of the good — further, I’ve never met a perfect candidate. I like Sanders and I adore Obama, and at the end of the day, each are politicians, and each have stances or actions that I just don’t dig. You don’t get into this big game without some blood on your hands. (We all love FDR, and conveniently forget that he put Japanese-Americans in internment camps.)

Politics can’t be a game of polarities, because that’s how nothing gets done. It’s a game of elasticity and compromise. I think Sanders rocked up a helluva campaign — historic, really, both him as a candidate and with his top-notch grassroots campaigning. (And I hope now to see that campaign pivot to continue pushing that agenda across all the tickets, both in supporting Hillary and in pushing her to be a better candidate for the common man.)

At the start of today, I see a fair amount of joy and anger in equal measure this morning on THESE HERE INTERNETS, and I think that’s okay and understandable — primary season is tough and it divides us for a time and we back one candidate with our hearts and often enough with our wallets, so to see it go one way over another makes us worry. The anger’s normal, and nobody should shame you for it. The joy is normal, too, and likewise, you shouldn’t be made to feel bad for that kind of pride. With hearts on sleeves, I know that the primary season has left things a bit heated, but that’s okay. I think it’s also vital to remember that at the end of the day, we had two real candidates. Two candidates who could’ve run this country well and who each ran a really spectacular campaign based on actual values rather than discussing dick sizes and walls and being basically horrible to each other. That side is a urinal on fire. Our side, no matter how much we disagree on the minutiae of these two candidates, is the real deal.

My hope is that in the coming weeks we’ll see unity start to emerge, and bridges we set on fire will cool down and get some much-needed repairs, because coming up in the general election we have to defeat an ACTUAL SEPTIC SYSTEM who gained life and sentience upon being struck by lightning. We have a Cheeto-fingered, tanner-drinking, democracy-dismantling Hutt-slug to beat back in the general election. Further, we have a Congress to overturn, and we have to act like we can paint the road the blue from one coast to the other. If we want a progressive agenda in place, then we have to start building that infrastructure now — Sanders showed very clearly that this country hungers for a progressive, common man approach to politics, and to earn that out means we’re going to have to do more than elect just one person — we’re going to have to take it all the way down to every itty-bitty district, to every voter.

Be well. Find joy. Express anger. And soon, I hope, we unify.

I’m with her.

Comments off, because c’mon.

What Exactly Makes A Damn Good Story?

A fine human being (or a very savvy robot) emailed me to ask a really important — and head-bonkingly difficult — question.

This human-slash-robot said:

I’m good at idea part. I have lots of notes for several novels on characters, who they are, how they know each other, what they want, their backstories. On settings, where and when everything takes place. I’m also good at the “sit down and shit out words” part. I can knock out 10k words in a week if I’m really in a groove.

But what I’m bad at is the STORY part. I’m horrible at getting from “I know the basic setup” to “I have an outline for where this is going”. Lately, most of my abandoned projects are abandoned because I just don’t have an idea what these people do or what happens to them once I’ve created a situation. I write 4k or 10k words and realize, “I don’t have a real story here.” Any pointers you have along those lines are greatly appreciated. It’s the one thing I haven’t found so far in your book or on your blog: how do you create enough story-stuff to build a novel around? And if I can’t seem to do it, should I just give up on novels?

So, to clarify –

The ideas are easy. (And they are. Ideas are baubles — cheap, chintzy, shiny, and freely available.) The writing is easy in the sense that, okay, you can sit down and dig the word ditches in Unicorn Land till your fingers go black and rot at the knuckles.

But story.

Story.

That’s the hard part, this humanbot is right. Story is an unruly beast.

Plot? Plot is easy. Plot is simple. Plot is just: the order of operations and events within the story as revealed to the audience. It’s a sequence of happenings — ideally, those happenings are driven by characters rather than by a COLD AND UNFEELING UNIVERSE, and in a perfect world the plot is a road built by the wherewithal of those characters, but either way, the plot is just the program. They do this, they do that, this happens, this happens, then that happens, he does a thing, she does a thing, the end, go home.

But plot is not story.

Plot is the arrow, and story is the apple that it punctures. Story is all the stuff. All the fibrous material and intangible air surrounding the fiddly bits. The story is the whole beast. It’s the whole animal. And you have to use the whole animal.

But here, I’m saying a lot of words, and I’m not helping you understand story very much at all. And that’s because story is a hard thing to understand. Writers put words to paper, but storytellers take those words — or images, in the case of film and TV and comics — and spin that dross into candy floss. Writers make horses. Storytellers fucking make unicorns, man.

So, what is story?

At the simplest level, story is a mechanism of desire and denial, of conflict and escalation and complication before resolution. I, the character, have a problem. I seek to solve my problem, but between me and the solution wait an obstacle course of other problems and other people and those people have competing desires. And I, the character, navigate that Scylla and Charybdis to either answer my desire or fail to manifest my desire. I solve my problem or I jolly well fucking don’t. That’s the story. There will be some shape to it — a rise to a mountainous peak, a slithering heavenward curve, a jagged line of fanged peaks, a rollercoaster going left and right. (See an earlier post of mine about story shapes and narrative architecture.)

I said once (“In Which I Critique Your Story That I Haven’t Read“) that story can look like:

1. HEY LOOK A PROBLEM

2. HEY LOOK A SOLUTION

3. THE END YAY

But, really, it probably ends up looking like:

1. HEY LOOK A PROBLEM

2. I’M GONNA JUST GO AHEAD AND FIX THAT PROBLEM AND –

3. OH GOD I MADE IT WORSE

4. OH FUCK SOMEBODY ELSE IS MAKING IT WORSE TOO

5. WAIT I THINK I GOT THIS –

6A. SHIT SHIT SHIT

6B. FUCK FUCK FUCK

7. IT’S NOT JUST WORSE NOW BUT DIFFERENT

8. EVERYTHING IS COMPLICATED 

9. ALL IS LOST

10. WAIT, IS THAT A LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL?

11. IT IS BUT IT’S A VELOCIRAPTOR WITH A FLASHLIGHT IN ITS MOUTH

12. WAIT AN IDEA

13. I HAVE BEATEN THE VELOCIRAPTOR AND NOW I HAVE A FLASHLIGHT AND MY PROBLEMS ARE SOLVED IN PART BUT NOT TOO NEATLY BECAUSE TIDY, PAT ENDINGS MAKE STORY JESUS ANGRY, SO ANGRY THAT STORY JESUS GIVES EVERYONE MOUTH HERPES

Still, that’s a program. It’s not quite plot, but it’s plotty — because it suggests a series of events. Or, at the very least, it suggests a mechanism. And a mechanism is a cold, implacable motherfucker. Story, on the other hand, isn’t cold. Story is a warm whiskey burn.

On the one hand, any character-conflict-escalation-resolution narrative probably ends up being “a story.” A man catches a fish isn’t much of a story, because his problem isn’t a problem. His desire isn’t denied. (A fish catches a man — now, that’s a story.)

Story is a sum greater than the parts of the plot. It is more than the mechanism.

I’m still not helping, I know.

Story is all those things, but it connects to us. A story is interesting. A story lets us see ourselves in it — and it is in that way both a unique snowflake and a universal precept. Or, more to the point, the story is the unique delivery system by which we get to talk about universal concepts and problems. We can talk about a THING WE ALL UNDERSTAND by framing it around a narrative unique to the author — every character and setting and conflict is a potential lens through which we can look upon this universal problem. Story takes this lens and it helps us to see old problems in new ways. Stories make us feel and think. Stories have power. Stories move us, shape us, and do the same to the world. It does this in the way that a song can do it. It has rhythm, like a song — slow to fast, up and down and then up again. Pause, leap, wait, then run. Stories are not a manicured garden. They’re an unruly forest –

A tangle of thorns in which we find ourselves happily ensnared.

My father was a storyteller, and he used to tell stories about his day at work or this time he got into a knife fight or that other time he and my mother jumped a ravine on his snowmobile, and often enough, his stories had the feel of a joke or a magic trick. There was the sense of a turn in there, a pivot, a punchline. A snake twisting in the margins. A sudden turn left when you thought you were going right. And you waited for that. You weren’t just interested to see what was going to happen — because, obviously, he survived — you waited to see the complications. You wanted more than just what was tied to the end of the rope, you wanted the kinks and knots in the rope itself. You want an interesting journey, not just a desirable destination.

It’s why if you want to be more than just a writer, you need to look at good storytellers. Comedians are a good place to start: Tig Notaro, Aziz Ansari, George Carlin, Louis CK. Listen to songs that tell stories — not just pop songs, but songs with tales to tell. Watch documentaries: note that documentaries are a good example of taking the mechanism of plot (by which I mean, a sequence of events) and translating that in a bigger way, finding messages, finding a throughline that hangs it all together and allows the material to transcend just THE THINGS THAT HAPPENED. (Actually, that calls to mind a book which is not a documentary: The Things They Carried, which is as much about war as it is about story. In fact, I’d argue it’s more about story than it is about war.) Best of all, find those people in your life who are natural storytellers. That guy at work. Your cousin. Your grandmother. Get them to tell a story. Listen to how they do it. How do they frame it? How do they ease you into it? What’s the hook? Why is it interesting?

None of this answers the question, of course.

None of this really explains story.

To do that, I’d probably need a lot more room. But maybe it helps. And maybe it gets you thinking about some of this stuff, even though it fails to properly finish the job or give hard answers to the tough question of how to make story work.

As such, I figure this is a good place for an announcement:

I’ve got a book coming out next year with Writer’s Digest that will tackle exactly this. The book is called Damn Good Story and I’m not sure of a release date yet, but I suspect latter half of 2017. It tackles all this unruly stuff — and it will be less about providing concrete answers to the question of what makes a good story and will instead just attempt to crack open the geode that is your head so we can all get access to the shiny bits inside. And in the meantime, if you’d like to check out some of my other writing books, you can nab the Gonzo Writing Book Bundle (that’ll get you eight books for $20), or you can go grab The Kickass Writer, also from Writer’s Digest. So, coming soon: DAMN GOOD STORY. Until then, we’ll keep talking here at the blog, see what we can figure out together.

A quick homework assignment if you’re so inclined:

Drop into the comments and recommend what you consider a real good story (or who you consider a damn good storyteller) — bonus points for something that isn’t just a book or a movie. Songs. Documentaries. Comedy routines. Whatever.

Macro Monday Wears Its Spots And Dots Proudly

BEHOLD THESE LITTLE LADYBOOGERS.

I’m warning you, too, I have some new spider macros.

And I’m gonna post them.

Not this week. But next week, mos def.

I KNOW. I know! I said I wouldn’t. But they’re so cool. And spiders, c’mon — spiders are helpful little beasts. All those times you went to the doctor and you’re like LOOK AT THIS SPIDER BITE, and the doctor reminds you that 90% of spider bites aren’t actually spider bites? Spiders are great. They eat bad bugs. They’re like possums in that way — we hate on possums (sorry, “opossum”) but they eat thousands of ticks a week. And ticks are little monsters.

Anyway! Cool spider photos incoming next week. I will give you enough white space at the fore of the post so you never have to scroll down and see them ever, ever, ever.

What else is going on?

In a couple weeks I’ll be at the Orlando Book Festival, giving a keynote, signing some books.

On 6/22, I’ll be at Doylestown Bookshop, hanging out with Paul Tremblay and talking about his (really fucking amazing) newest, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock.

I may be at Let’s Play Books in July, too, to talk Star Wars.

I’ll be at SDCC in July.

Then in August, I’ll be back at the Doylestown Bookshop for the launch of Invasive!

You can preorder the book, signed, from Doylestown Bookshop here. (And if you don’t know, pre-ordering helps the author and the publishing ecosystem in a whole host of ways. It conveys to the seller and publisher that the author is in demand. It helps the seller stock the book. It helps the author FEEL GOOD ABOUT HIMSELF AND NOT WEEP OPENLY INTO HIS FROSTED FLAKES and stuff like that.)

I think that’s all, folks.

Flash Fiction Challenge: Must Contain A Map

Maps are glorious things. With them we find treasure. We make our way across counties, states and countries. We use them to mark DANGER. Maps can be public, secret, or something interstitial. Maps can be magic or mundane.

Maps are cool.

So, you will write a piece of flash fiction that contains a map.

Not a literal, drawn map (though if you can do that, you’re extra-awesome). No, I mean, in the fiction itself, a map is a part of the story. That’s it. That’s the only stipulation besides the usuals:

Length: ~1000 words

Due by: Fri, June 10th, noon EST

Post at your online space. Give us a link in the comments. The end.

Steven Spohn: I Am Not Your Plot Device

Steven Spohn is a writer and also the COO and outreach director at AbleGamers, a charitable organization dedicated to helping disabled people improve their lives through gaming. Steve wanted to write something about an upcoming film based on a novel, Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, and he asked if it would be a good fit here. And I think it’s important to have his voice heard with things like this. So, here’s Steven! (Oh, and don’t forget to read another post of his here — “Your Last Good Day.”)

* * *

An Open Letter to Jojo Moyes and Aspiring Writers –

As a child, I never really got to “see myself” on-screen in the same way that other children did in Superman, Batman or Xena.

Sure. I could watch Keanu Reeves as Neo, indulge the fantasy, dive into the escapism and picture myself as The Chosen One. After all, no one can fly or dodge bullets like Mr. Anderson, so the fact that I couldn’t walk like he does wasn’t exactly a stretch of my imagination.

Historically, Hollywood releases a movie with a profoundly disabled character once every few years. And although the frequency has been increasing as disability becomes more accepted in the mainstream, main characters with severe disabilities are extremely rare and (in my experience) never seen in romances.

In fact, the lack of main characters in books or TV with severe physical disabilities confining them to a wheelchair are so rare that if I had a quarter for every time someone asked me if my favorite fictional character was Professor Charles Xavier, I could literally buy you a Ferrari.

So, you can probably imagine when I first saw the trailer for Me Before You, a movie depicting a quadriplegic man romancing a young female caretaker and sharing some of the same thoughts most of us with severe disabilities have, I would’ve been excited. “Finally! A romance about a quadriplegic man and an able-bodied woman.”

(Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh993__rOxA)

**Spoiler warning below for the book and movie Me Before You**

And I was, until I read the book.

The female lead Louisa is hired to take care of Will, which unbeknownst to her is a type of suicide watch. When she finds out he plans to go to Dignitas — a place in Switzerland that helps people commit assisted suicide, she’s distraught. Eventually Lou comes around and decides she will do her best to change his mind during the remainder of the six-month window Will promised his parents he would use to consider his choice. In the end, despite falling in love with each other and Louisa begging Will not to go, he decides to stick to his decision and end his life.

“I don’t want you to be tied to me, to my hospital appointments, to the restrictions on my life. I don’t want you to miss out on all the things someone else could give you. And, selfishly, I don’t want you to look at me one day and feel even the tiniest bit of regret or pity that — … You have no idea how this would play out. You have no idea how you’re going to feel even six months from now. And I don’t want to look at you every day, to see you naked, to watch you wandering around the annex in your crazy dresses and not… not be able to do what I want with you. Oh, Clark, if you had any idea what I want to do to you right now. And I… I can’t live with that knowledge. I can’t. It’s not who I am. I can’t be the kind of man who just… accepts.” (pp. 325-326)

Men and women who are severely disabled fight demons that speak the words above almost every day. There is not a man or woman who is quadriplegic or near the quadriplegic stage of a progressive disease who has not worried about being a burden to their loved ones or if being in a relationship is fair. Those questions are in the back of our minds every moment of every day.

‘Me Before You’ was an opportunity to create a commercially successful, Nicholas-Sparks-level, true genre-defining romantic movie starring someone who is severely physically handicapped conquering his demons, winning the girl and riding off into the sunset like we see in so many other Hollywood romances.

If those types of books and movies were more common, this movie wouldn’t even be controversial because it would just be one movie of dozens. Unfortunately, there are very few scripts written about severely physically disabled people, let alone in romance.

Moyes could have tackled society’s view of people with disabilities and sexuality. In the view of many people, just being disabled, in and of itself, takes sexuality away from being human. Instead, this story perpetuates the stereotype of sexually neutral disabled people by painting the picture of a sexually attractive quadriplegic man and then neutering him.

(The most sexually intense scene between Lou and Will is a few kisses.)

Instead we get a tragedy. We get thousands upon thousands of people with disabilities who will finally see a character like themselves on the big screen in a real Hollywood blockbuster who chooses to end his own life because being disabled is too hard.

Even though Will gets the girl, has ridiculous amounts of money, power, oh and A CASTLE, he can’t imagine living life with a ridiculously higher quality of life than most people with disabilities will ever be afforded.

So, if the movie isn’t about them getting it on or Will’s triumph over adversity, what is the point of the movie?

Will is a plot device.

The book was never about Will. The story is about Lou and how Will’s influence changes her life. Lou fails to show Will the joy that can still be had in the world, even if you find love, because you are dealing with some sort of disability.

Goodreads interviewed Jojo Moyes at one point directly asking if she consulted with anyone with quadriplegia before writing the book:

“Not quadriplegics. The thing that really informed it was a member of my family who suffers from a progressive disease. I have been involved in feeding her, taking her out, and that kind of thing.”

While it’s disturbing she did not conduct any interviews with people who are actually quadriplegic, Moyes has a deaf son. She’s personally seen the attitudes some people can exhibit around her son calling the negativity “frustrating” in the same interview. She knows what it’s like to have people presume things about you or your loved one without actually knowing them.

Supporters of this book hope it will help open a dialogue on the subject of assisted suicide. But what a lot of able-bodied supporters don’t understand is when you are living life as a quadriplegic person, you’re dealing with the dark themes presented in the book and movie every day.

I’ve had perfect strangers walk up to me and ask if “my dick works.” I’ve had the heart-wrenching conversation with lovers explaining the restrictions on my life and how those restrictions would affect them. I’ve had people literally say to me “I’m not as strong as you. If I was in your position I would’ve killed myself.”

In real-life, the girl doesn’t always get the boy, sometimes people decide to commit suicide, and love doesn’t conquer all.

The Christopher Reeves foundation released a brief but powerful statement on the movie:

“Me Before You touches on poignant themes about what it is like to both live with a spinal cord injury and care for someone as a family member and caregiver.

However, while Jojo Moyes’ book is defined as fiction, the character of Will Traynor is very real to 5.6 million Americans living with paralysis. At the Reeve Foundation, our mission includes enhancing quality of life, independence and health for all individuals living with paralysis.

The Reeve Foundation does not believe disability is synonymous with hopelessness or that living with a spinal cord injury is considered a fate worse than death.

“Disability does not sideline or disqualify someone from living a full and active life. Everyone living with paralysis can live boldly.”

After the former man of steel himself, Christopher Reeve, was in an accident leaving him completely quadriplegic, his wife Dana wrote how to be a wife, not a caretaker. That yes, there are some parts of someone’s care that can be challenging, but ultimately, you’re still human. A woman and a man in love, lust.

You see, for people like me, Christopher Reeves, and millions of other people who have quadriplegic conditions, this isn’t just a movie. This is people seeing a misrepresentation of what it’s like to be quadriplegic. It’s like if Hollywood took your life and focused on the darkest hours, ignoring all the triumphs, and only noted the worst-case scenario.

There are so many “meet cute” heartfelt, endearing, hilarious, sweet and tear-jerking parts of being in a relationship with someone who has a disability that you will probably never get to see on the big screen.

You probably won’t get to see a character working out like Rocky to be able to stand for just a moment on his wedding day like my friend, Marco, did. You probably won’t get to see a character smacking her boob off furniture trying to get into sexual positions more convoluted than the Kama Sutra like my girlfriends have done. You probably won’t get to see anything like most of the perfect romance or rom-com stories I know because getting Hollywood to back these kinds of plots in books or movies is difficult, and the one time they did it was written by an author who didn’t even bother to interview quadriplegic people.

The reason we’re seeing so much of an outcry from the disability community is that people with disabilities are often pigeonholed into inspiring others to “live boldly.” A quadriplegic man “sacrificing himself” so that his love can live “a better life” isn’t a heartwarming sacrificial moment, it’s a heartbreaking confirmation of our worst fears. Because our culture is so heavily rooted in Hollywood, young quadriplegic people could see this movie where the “hero” commits assisted suicide as confirmation that the demons in their head might be right. Maybe life isn’t worth living. Maybe the burden is too great.

So, I’m here to ask you, aspiring writer, please don’t make the same mistakes. If you’re going to write about a minority or disability, do the same level of research you would do about a foreign land or a subject you have never personally experienced. Realize that you could accidentally be playing into the fears of a group you’re trying to support.

Please remember that people with disabilities are not plot devices.

To those who are not writers: Please don’t approach random people in wheelchairs and ask if their private parts work.

(Edited to add: best to not approach any stranger to ask them anything about their privates. — c.)

Steven Spohn: Website | Twitter

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