Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 111

Kat Howard: Five Things I Learned Writing Roses And Rot

Imogen has grown up reading fairy tales about mothers who die and make way for cruel stepmothers. As a child, she used to lie in bed wishing that her life would become one of these tragic fairy tales because she couldn’t imagine how a stepmother could be worse than her mother now. As adults, Imogen and her sister Marin are accepted to an elite artists’ colony—Imogen as a writer and Marin as a dancer. Soon enough, though, they realize that there’s more to the school than meets the eye. Imogen might be living in the fairy tale she’s dreamed about as a child, but it’s one that will pit her against Marin if she decides to escape her past to find her heart’s desire.

* * *

Not everyone needs to go to Hell.

Roses and Rot is a riff on the medieval ballad “Tam Lin.” And one of the things that has always been my favorite part of “Tam Lin” is that every seven years, Faerie pays a tithe to Hell. And boy, do I love a good trip to Hell. I mean, it’s great in terms of story – the tragedy, and the direness of the situation, the impossible task to bring the lost person back safe, the backward glance.

Actually, you should probably skip that one.

But really, it’s one of my favorite tropes. So I tried and tried to make it work out in early drafts. Nope! Turns out, if you disappear one half of one of the most important relationships in your book for like the entire middle third of the text, things go flatter than a soda left out overnight. So for the sake of the story, I said goodbye to one of my favorite plot points.

Write for an audience.

From the moment I knew I wanted to write Roses and Rot, I knew I was writing this particular story for my sister. Now, you probably cannot write a book for my sister (well, you could, I suppose, but that might cross over into weird), but you can write a book for someone. Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s your best friend. Maybe it’s a fuck you to the person who told you that you couldn’t write. But writing a book can be hard, and it can help to have a person that you’re thinking of, where giving them that story can help you keep going.

But don’t write for everyone.

It ‘s a truth universally acknowledged that an author with a book is in want of a one-star review. Someone out there is going to hate what you write, because someone out there hates everything. And there’s something really freeing in acknowledging that you’re not here for everyone, you’re here for the people who like what you do. I mean, if what you want is a book about killer robots, or mind-controlled bee assassins, or a lonely astronaut on a quest for one more inhabitable planet, Roses and Rot is not going to be the book for you. (Though, I might want to write about mind-controlled bee assassins, actually.) But if you want a version of “Tam Lin” set at a modern day artists’ colony that has romance and betrayal and sacrifice and magic, it might well be.

Also, did I mention it has a sea monster? Don’t worry, we’ll get to that.

Romance novels will save you.

I spent one month doing a fairly massive revision of Roses and Rot. Like, throw out almost the entire draft and rewrite it in a month sort of revision. It was probably the hardest thing I’ve done in my career, and it fried my brain. (I ran into a friend at a local Starbucks, and he literally stepped back when I said hi because “it looks like you might bite someone.”) Not just because of the amount of words that I was trying to write every day, but because there are parts of this book that are not at all nice. Things hurt. Not everyone gets out of the story alive. I needed a way to step out of that world, and let me tell you, fun stories with a guaranteed happy ending? Yes and yes. I read Nora Roberts and Eloisa James and Tessa Dare and I think Julie Anne Long’s entire catalogue. Having the comfort of something that I liked that I could turn to at the end of the day’s writing was the best, and exactly what my brain needed to keep writing. Maybe it’s not romance novels for you – maybe it’s binging on a favorite tv show, or playing a well-loved video game. But have something that you can relax with that isn’t the writing, and that keeps you from biting people.

Sometimes you need a sea monster.

I do this thing, when I am stumped on how to begin writing for the day. I think of the weirdest possible thing that could happen. I figure that once I’ve shaken that bit loose from my brain, the stuff that the story actually needs will fall out, too. And sometimes it turns out that the weird bits were exactly what I needed.

In the case of Rose and Rot – set, by the way, mainly in a forested area of rural New Hampshire – I decided that an acid yellow sea monster needed to show up. I was probably going to edit it out later, once I got into the scene and figured things out, but (spoiler, I guess) it’s still there, because having the sea monster show up was a way for two characters to have a needed conversation. Like I said, sometimes the weird works out. Maybe for you, it’s not a sea monster, but whatever it is that you need to start writing, or keep writing, or distract your brain enough to get to the part of the plot that you actually need, use that. And write.

* * *

Kat Howard’s short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, anthologized in best of and annual best of collections, and performed on NPR. Roses and Rot is her debut novel. She lives in New Hampshire.

Kat Howard: Website | Twitter

Roses And Rot: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Crotch-Punching The Creative Yeti: Exploding More Writing Myths

Once in a while, I like to take the myths about writing that circulate, and I like to hunt them, and I like to slay them with my GOLDEN ARROWS OF WISDOM. (Man, how’s that for ego? ‘Golden arrows of wisdom?’ Somebody needs to give me a right good slapping.) Seriously, though, writers are often sandbagged by these persistent goblins of untruth that climb up on their backs and start riding them like ponies. That’s no good. You want to write, then write. And get shut of any toxic myths that would poison your process.

Here goes. Ten — no! Eleven! — myths I wanna kick in the basket.

“Writers have to write.”

The myth is that writers are urged, compelled, forced to write as if by some indomitable, external spirit. It’s true that many writers are driven obsessively to create, but the danger in this myth is that when you sit down for a day of writing, if you don’t feel the sacred wordmonkey spirit move through you, then you’re a bad writer, or not a writer, or that you just shouldn’t write at all. Some days I don’t want to write. Some days I am so uncompelled by the act that I’d rather do anything else at all. I’ll clean my desk, or build a blasphemous icon out of paperclips, or groom my hirsute body of various mites and ticks. It’s bullshit. Writers don’t always want to write. And that’s okay.

“Writers have to write every day.”

BZZT, false, poop, myth alert, no.

I write every day. I write every day because I am a person who a) needs the discipline and b) has a mortgage to pay and c) pays that mortgage with my crass penmonkeying. If I don’t write, I don’t get paid, and so I endeavor to write every day — and by every day, I don’t actually mean every day. I mean Monday through Friday. I take weekends off. I take holidays off. I take random days off to go do random shit.

Every writer is different. Every writer possesses a different process. Some people open their maws and disgorge 10,000 words at a time. Some writers peck through the word count — a hundred words here, a hundred there. One writer takes a year to write a book. Another takes three. I write a first draft in around 30-90 days. Everybody does their thing. No thing is wrong as long as the thing is getting done. Whatever your process is, accept no shame for it. (Shame is a worthless booster anyway.) The key here is: make sure your process works. Some writers get married to a process that doesn’t work, and then they stubbornly cling to it like a monkey riding a tiger, afraid that if they leave the beast, the tiger will eat them. We can always refine our process. And as we grow and our lives change, so do our processes. Just as there is no one perfect process for all writers, there is no one perfect process for you individually, either.

“If you’re not published by Age XYZ, then you might as well be a rodeo clown.”

Mmmnope.

Some writers start young.

Some start middle-aged.

Others in retirement.

OTHERS SCREAM NOVELS FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE.

Who cares? Write if you wanna write. You don’t even need to marry being a writer with being published. If you want to write, write independently of your desire to be published. That secondary part can come later. Write to write, don’t write to be published. It matters little what age you are. Age lends weight and experience to the work. You’ll be fine.

If you’re 15, 50 or 105, go ahead, write.

“Outlining diminishes magic.”

a) writing is not magic, though it sometimes feels that way

b) outlining, or any act, will not kill the magic that doesn’t exist

c) magic does not exist

d) unless you’re harry potter

e) but you’re not harry potter

People worry somehow that outlining like, bottles the lightning or steals the thunder or robs them of some precious elf juice. Like, if they outline, they’ll give away their novel to this ugly process and now it’s all ruined, pouty-pout-mopey-face. Listen, if you ruin your story by outlining it, then your story wasn’t that fucking exciting to begin with — and oh ha ha ha oh shit it’s a good thing you never got to the editing phase, because boy howdy, editing feels less like wizardry and more like plumbing.

To be clear, I’m not saying you need to outline. (Though I’ll always remind writers that though you may hate the idea, some publishers will ask for synopses and outlines, especially as your career advances, so it remains a skill worth learning if not universally incorporating.) What I’m saying is, if you choose to do it, it won’t kill your work.

I compare writing a novel to taking a cross-country trip: in taking that trip, you would likely plot your journey, but plotting that journey does not rob you of all the things you will see along the way. Imagining the journey is not taking the journey. Nor does it prevent you from taking unexpected routes or exits when the sights call for it.

“I don’t need to know the rules.”

You need to know the rules because that’s how writing works. You only break the rules once you know them — breaking the rules willfully is an act of artistic independence. Breaking the rules ignorantly is an act of being an asshole. Knowing the rules is a good way to realize what rules are important to you and which ones are not. That is a way to be stylistically in command and not some Forrest Gump doofus gumping his way around Novel-Land hoping to get lucky and not shit it all up. Breaking rules with knowledge of the rules is some bad-ass, sinister shit. It’s walking away from an exploding building without flinching.

Be that character. That character is awesome.

“I’m not a real writer because [insert reason here].”

Real writers write.

Like, that’s it.

Three words, so simple, so precious. Do you write? You are a writer.

Avoid artistic purity tests.

Actually, avoid most purity tests, because they’re cliquish and elite.

“I need an MFA or some kind of formal training.”

NOPE.

Nobody cares about your MFA.

Nobody cares about Clarion or your degree or what karate belt you’re up to or what you had for dinner last night. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter one lick.

That’s not to say MFAs are bad. Or that Clarion is bad. They can be great. They may be useful to you in building skills. Look at it this way: if you submit a manuscript that is shitty, it doesn’t matter if you have an MFA. If you submit a manuscript that is amazing, it really doesn’t matter if you went to Clarion. You do programs to learn, not to build a ladder. (Admittedly, sometimes these programs offer you connections, and those are good. Just the same, they are utterly non-essential and you still have to actually write a good book. Though, more on that in a few.)

“Writing is a talent.”

Nope! Some writers are certainly talented, but talent ain’t shit if you don’t have the work ethic to back it up. Worry about skill. You can build skill. You can practice skill. You can manifest the desire to be a writer, and then you can be a writer by iterating and reiterating and learning and thinking. Sure, some jerks are probably sprung from the uterus with a copy of Scrivener in their hands and half-a-novel already written. They still have to do the work. Talent is like a field of fertile dirt — you still gotta get your hands grimy, you still gotta plant the garden. I’ve known a great many talented writers from my youth, and very few of them made anything of themselves. Meanwhile, I’m a total shithead, and I’ve got a proper writing career because I work very hard at doing it. If talent is real, it barely matters without work. So do the thing you control. Do the work.

“Someone is going to steal my idea.”

They’re not.

Ideas are not precious little snowflakes that melt if you breathe on them.

Ideas are not diamonds people want to take.

Ideas are rugged, brutish, ugly things. Ideas are pieces of wood and hunks of stone. It’s up to you to sand them and polish them and fit them together how you see fit. They’re not rare gems. Your vision of an idea will be different than mine even if they come from the same core concept. I could right now try to write Die Hard and I’d come up with my own version of it without even meaning to. The only thing original about your work is you. You’re the rare gem. The idea is just the light that filters through your many unusual facets.

“Writing is supposed to be easy.”

Ha ha ha ha

Haha hehe ho oh oh oh

ahhh

yeah

*wipes tears away*

*blows nose*

That’s a good one.

Some days writing is easy.

Some days writing is like trying to castrate a unicorn with a BB gun.

If writing does not come easy to you:

Welcome to the club, the club called THE WRITING IS SOMETIMES FUCKING HARD CLUB, where we sit around our treehouse and try to write and bite our knuckles till their bloody and engage in training montages (punching frozen beef, drinking lots of whiskey, running through a gauntlet of readers smacking you with one-star Amazon reviews nailed to wooden paddles). Writing isn’t easy. It’s work. And sometimes work feels like work and that’s okay.

“All it takes is for me to write a good book.”

And here, a hard truth.

Writing a good book matters. It matters to me. It matters to you.

It also doesn’t matter as much as you want.

Here is a true fact: lots of great books have failed either to get published or to sell well once they got published. Here is another true fact: lots of very shitty books have done very well.

This is just the way of things. It’s the way of life. Sometimes mediocre people excel. Sometimes geniuses die alone and broke. It can go the other way, too — mediocre people end up landscaping your lawn while you, the genius, are a billionaire who goes to sleep on a bed of her own bitcoins.

Here’s what I will tell you: writing a good book is not the key to the kingdom, but it is valuable just the same. It’s valuable because a writing career — and really, all of life — is predicated on luck. That sounds suspiciously like I’m admitting that there really is magic in the world, but I don’t consider this magic. I consider the existence of life to be relatively random. A mad confluence of atoms and molecules. A turn of the wind, a cataclysm, a shift in weather.

Luck is the universe walking halfway down the road and stopping.

You have to walk, too. You have to meet luck in the middle.

Sometimes, bad luck happens in life, right? But often when this is the case, it’s like — okay, you still had to do something to catch the glinting flinty eye of the Bad Luck Beast. It was bad luck that you went out and a deer ran out in front of your car and the deer came up over the hood and through your windshield and beheaded you. (That actually happened to a guy outside my house when I was a kid, by the way. Big deer took off his head.) That’s bad luck, but it still required actions to take place, right? You still had to get in your car. Still had to drive it down that road at night. It was random, but it wasn’t impossible — like, deer exist. They crash a lot of cars here. They tend to go down backroads at twilight. And if you’re out, and you’re driving fast enough, and if you’re not paying enough attention…

Wham.

The deer is in the backseat of your car.

Along with your head.

Bad luck. Oops. So sorry.

It’s not that the person deserved that. It’s not that you shouldn’t go driving just in case a deer tries to suicide in front of your speeding bullet of death-steel. But factors lined up in a certain way because you nudged them to.

You met the universe halfway and it fucking killed you with a deer.

Writing is like this.

You cannot control luck, but you can get its attention.

You get its attention in a lot of ways — by engaging with the industry, by going to conventions, by entering an MFA program or by trying to accepted to Clarion. And of course, one of the chiefmost ways of urging luck to your side is by writing a book. You won’t get a book published if, uhh, you don’t write a book. That’d be fucking weird. Not just improbable, but impossible. You write a book, and that ups your chances. You write a good book — and that adds more to your chance. It’s like stacking positive modifiers on a dice roll in a roleplaying game. Sure, you might be able to kill that ogre with a stick you find, but your chances are a lot better if you have like, a chaingun that shoots magical swords.

Writing a book is like forging a sword.

But writing a good book is like forging a magic sword.

I know, I know, I said there was no magic, but damnit, this is metaphor.

The magic sword does not guarantee you’ll slay the ogre.

But it damn sure ups your chances.

Besides, magic swords are fucking baller. And writing a good book gives you the satisfaction of having done so. No, writing a good book is not a guarantee that you will be successful. But it feels great and it ups your chances, so try to do it anyway.

* * *

ZER0ES.

An Anonymous-style rabble rouser, an Arab spring hactivist, a black-hat hacker, an old-school cipherpunk, and an online troll are each offered a choice: go to prison or help protect the United States, putting their brains and skills to work for the government for one year.

But being a white-hat doesn’t always mean you work for the good guys. The would-be cyberspies discover that behind the scenes lurks a sinister NSA program, an artificial intelligence code-named Typhon, that has origins and an evolution both dangerous and disturbing. And if it’s not brought down, will soon be uncontrollable.

Out now Harper Voyager.

Doylestown Bookshop | WORD | Joseph-Beth Booksellers | Murder by the Book

Powells | Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | iBooks | Google Play | Books-a-Million

Macro Monday Is Sun-Kissed And Rain-Tickled Teeheehee

Took that one at the end of last week, and I kinda love it.

And, same subject, different angle:

So, yeah. There you go.

Me and B-Dub went around on Saturday, just looking for cool stuff to look at, stuff that might be worthy of a photo or three — and for those of you with kids little or big, we’ve found that giving him a camera was a really great investment. And I didn’t buy him one of those kiddie cameras, because really, those are very expensive and are… honestly, just cameras. So, last year for the B-Dub B-Day, we got him a Nikon Coolpix camera — waterproof and a little rugged, so he can drop it and get it wet and it’s no big deal. And he loves it. He took to it quickly and knows more about it than I do. I’ll post some of his photos eventually, but they’re a lot of fun. I mean, some are horrible and are just pictures of dog butts. But, y’know. Art.

He and I were looking for bugs and flowers and turtles. We found the first two. Not so much the third. Those photos will make their way here eventually. But it was fun, a good bonding thing, a good excuse to go out and just examine the world big and small. Sometimes people accuse photographers of looking more at the camera than at the real world, as if it creates a separation, but I don’t buy that. I think the camera is a way to interpret and capture the world — both as it is and as the camera can contain it. And if there is any separation, it’s the separation that must exist between REALITY and the artist, who is a TRANSLATOR OF REALITY. There always exists a middleman, and mastery of that interstitial process has value, I think. I’ll shut up now.

LESSEE, WHAT ELSE.

In case you missed it, I’ll be in SUNNY CROTCH-HOT FLORIDA in June — I’ll be doing the closing keynote at the Orlando Book Festival. Details here if you want ‘em.

Oh, also, this:

Cool, huh? That’s the Japanese version of Zer0es alongside some promo material for the mass-market paperback version of the book which lands May 31st, if you wanna pre-order.

And finally, I got a copy of the Chinese translation of Blackbirds:

PRETTY AWESOME.

So, that’s it.

I’m out.

*leaps into Monday’s slavering maw*

*hopes to emerge from Friday’s puckered sphincter in five days*

*waits*

Writing Dialogue, And How It Relates To Plot And Character

HEY LOOK I STORIFIED SOME STUFF I SAID.

This batch: about dialogue.

Please to enjoy.

[View the story “Tweetstorm About Writing Dialogue” on Storify]

Flash Fiction Challenge: They Fight Crime!

THEY FIGHT CRIME.

It is one of the greatest websites in the history of sited webs.

You will go there. You will click on the link. It will give you an awesome pairing of two characters (I just got HE’S A BISEXUAL SCIENTIST WHO BELIEVES HE CAN NEVER LOVE AGAIN and SHE’S A PARANOID MAGICIAN’S ASSISTANT WITH HER OWN DAYTIME TV SHOW, which is really just amazing). You will take these two characters and put them in a story together.

I don’t really care so much that they actually fight crime.

You can have that as a basis, but mostly, I’m just looking to see these characters interact.

So, do that.

Length: ~1500 words

Due by: May 20th, noon EST

Post online at your online space.

Link back to the story in the comments.

Enjoy.

[EDIT: I see that the site automatically makes each of the two characters male and female — I don’t think there’s any need to enforce that in your stories. Feel free to go with whatever genders you see fit.)

Defy Reality, Become An Artist

Nobody wants you to be an artist.

It’s for a lot of reasons. Some come from a good place — they think, hey, we want better for you. The life of an artist is hard. Be a bricklayer, a doctor, a ROCKET LAWYER, something, anything. Art is how you lose. Art is how you die. Don’t be an artist, because we don’t want to see you struggle, starve, and go mad.

Some of the reasons come from a deeply cankerous place: jealousy (“why do you get to fritter away your hours MAKING ART and I have to sell toilets?”) or misunderstanding (“art isn’t work, it’s just lazy piffle for lazy losers”) or alien menace (“ART GIVES HUMAN BEINGS HOPE AND IT MAKES THEM MORE RESISTANT TO HOSTILE TAKEOVER FROM EXTRATERRESTRIAL FORCES”). Some governments don’t want artists because art is truth, even when couched in illusion or deception. Some schools don’t want art because how do you test art, and everything is about the test, goddamnit. Want to get a mortgage? Tell them you’re an artist and ha ha ha oh shit.

Art is a hobby, art is a waste of time, art is a thing you do when you’re in elementary school or in the retirement home. It isn’t a life. It isn’t a career. FUCK YOU, NO ARTING. It’s all bullshit, of course, because nearly everything demands art. Advertisements. User interfaces. Logos. The whole Internet is made of WORDS and IMAGES. It started off looking dog-ugly, like something a self-aware bank ATM would shit into the world — but then it became a thing of elegance and design (er, mostly). It became a thing of art, collectively.

Let’s switch gears a little.

Last week I wrote a post about anxiety, and on Twitter and across Ye Jolly Interwebs people asked, well, okay, whilst in the throttling grip of the Mighty Anxiety Snake, how do you wriggle free enough to still make art? And it’s a fine, fine question, because the business side of art can help lend cosmic-level strength to the Mighty Anxiety Snake, the one who twists around you, the one who constricts your heart and makes it feel like your throat is closing. Think long and hard about the business — not just today, but tomorrow, next year, five years — and you’ll find yourself breathless in existential despair. It’s a series of mountains and cliffs and you’re just a wee mountain climber and a storm is rolling in and ye fucking gods, why not just go home and have some liquor and a nap? Then you start thinking about what other people are able to accomplish: awards, sales, movie rights, foreign rights, six-figure deals, seven-figure deals, publishing contracts that stipulate the writer gets a pet snow leopard (by the way this is why you don’t fuck with Neil Gaiman because his snow leopard will hunt you as prey). It’s all very crushing. It’s like laying down and having a hydraulic press push in on your chest.

So: how does one deal with that?

Well, obviously, I am not you. (Not yet, not until I finish work on THE MACHINE, and then we’ll just see, won’t we?) As such, I cannot possibly speculate how you deal with it, but I can speak quite expertly on how I deal with it, because I am the me rooted in this floppy, bearded body.

And here is one of the ways I deal with it:

I worry very little about the result of what I’m doing.

Note: what I mean is not that I care nothing for the quality of the result. I care very much about my own level of satisfaction with the thing I’m writing. It’ll never be perfect, but I want it to be good. But the key here is that I want it to be good because I want to be happy with it.

I don’t care if you’re happy with it.

And the “you” in that equation can be, well, really anybody. The nebulous Audience. Or reviewers. Or publishers and editors. Or other authors. I don’t worry about because I can’t worry about it. I don’t know what you want. (See earlier comment: I am not you.) I don’t know what the market is doing. Chasing the market is like chasing starlight: by the time I find the star that made the light, I remember that light travels slow and that star is already dead. I don’t know what reviewers want. I don’t know what reviewer I’ll get. If I sit down and I go to write and I carry with me the baggage of expectation — if I sit there and try to imagine what every single potential interaction with my book will be like — then I’ll probably freeze up. I’ll soak my shirt with blubbery fear-weeping and sadness-snot. I’ll make a low keening sound in the back of my throat like a ferret pining for its ancient ferret homelands.

The key there is: I cannot be pinned by expectation.

Some people think outlining a book robs the book of its magic. Some people think the business kills the joy of making words and creating art. But for me, the great thing that will siphon the joy out of what I do — the pesticide that murders the butterflies flitting about in the dark shrubbery that is my heart — is expectation. Not my expectation. But yours.

And now we come full circle because once again, I say:

Nobody wants you to be an artist.

Not the people who love you. Not the people who hate you. Not the people who don’t know one whit about you. Nobody wants that for you or your life.

I want you to think about that for a moment.

I want you to focus on that for a moment.

Take the idea like a pebble or a pearl, tuck it in your mouth, swirl it around.

This is what that does for me:

When I sit down and I start to write, I take a secret thrill in what I’m doing. Because this is forbidden territory. This is verboten. Everyone has built a fence of expectation around what I’m doing and yet, here I am, having climbed the fence. I’m making art and the world doesn’t want me to make art. I’m in a secret garden stealing your vegetables. I’m traipsing about someone’s home in the dark while they sleep. I’m mixing potions. I’m making monsters. I’m tap-dancing on the edge of a cliff, and the world can watch me kick off my shoes, pirouette, and lift both middle fingers in the air with a smugly self-satisfied look on my big beardo face.

Let me distill this down for you:

How do I survive my anxiety and the business and the expectations and still make art?

FUCK YOU, that’s how.

(Not you specifically! I’m sure you’re lovely.)

Don’t think I should be making art? FUCK YOU.

Don’t think I can finish this book and do it my way? FUCK YOU.

Think this is a waste of time? FUCK YOU, it’s my time to waste.

My anxiety wants to scare me away? FUCK YOU, I won’t be run off, Mighty Anxiety Snake!

Those two words — FUCK and YOU — form a glorious act of defiance, an empowering gush of confident magma in your chest that you can vomit all over reality’s face. Reality doesn’t want me doing this? Reality expects me to conform? HA HA HA HAVE MY ANGER-MAGMA, AND ALSO, FUCK YOU BIG, SUCKER.

So, when it comes time for you to sit down –

And start to write –

Or start to paint –

Or doodle or design or color or whatever it is that you do –

And you start to feel the Mighty Anxiety Snake coiling in your bowels –

And the weight of expectations pressing the air out of your chest –

And you start to look too far down the road and imagine all the potholes and broken bridges –

And you start comparing yourself to everyone else –

Extend one middle finger.

Then the other.

Scream FUCK YOU in a great profane yawp.

Then get to work.

Forget perfection. You can’t control success. You aren’t anybody else. You are you. It doesn’t matter if anyone believes in you. Let their disbelief charge your batteries. You can believe in you.

Focus on today. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Make something. Create something. Act in defiance of reality’s accord. Spit in the eye of any who expect you to do differently.

Relish in the unmitigated thrill of doing what nobody wants you to do.

Nobody wants you to be an artist.

But you do, so fuck them.

* * *

The journey to become a successful writer is long, fraught with peril, and filled with difficult questions: How do I write dialogue? How do I build suspense? What should I know about query letters? How do I start? Where are my pants?

The best way to answer these questions is to ditch your uncertainty and transform yourself into a Kick-Ass Writer. This new book from award-winning author Chuck Wendig combines the best of his eye-opening writing instruction — previously available in e-book form only — with all-new insights into writing and publishing. It’s an explosive broadside of gritty advice that will destroy your fears, clear the path, and help you find your voice, your story, and your audience.

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

Writer’s Digest

Macro Monday Rides Into Battle On The Back Of Skeledeer

My father always said it was a good idea to have your neighbors think you’re a little cuckoopants. Like, not full-bore batshit, because then they’ll KEEP AN EYE ON YOU, but just crazy enough that they know not to like, throw trash on your yard or encroach on your land like land parasites. I dunno if this counts, but by our driveway near our house there sits a stump, and on this stump sits a deer skull I found in the woods because, I dunno, skulls are fucking cool that’s why.

Anyway, so, I thought I’d snap some more pics of GLORIOUS SKELEDEER ALL HAIL THE LORD OF THE DEAD WOOD, some of which are macros. I like photographing bones and death and dead things, and as a point of trivia, I once crawled underneath and damn near into a decomposing deer to capture a shot. No, really, here is that shot. And here’s another one, a bit closer.

Anyway, please to enjoy:

 

Flash Fiction Challenge: Inspiration Of The Random Image

This link will take you to a random photo. You can keep clicking NEXT RANDOM IMAGE if you so choose. Click through the images until one of them speaks to you in some way — it scratches a creative itch somehow. Then write a short story based on that image as inspiration. (Try to nab a link to the photo, so you can put it in your story so we can see the inspiration.)

Length: ~1000 words

Due by: May 13th, noon, EST

Post at your online space.

Drop a link to it in the comments below.

Grab a photo and write.

Happy Star Wars Day, And May The Fourth Be With You

GET IT

BECAUSE IT’S MAY

AND IT’S THE FOURTH

OF MAY

AND THERE’S THAT THING THEY SAY

IN THOSE MOVIES

MAY THE FORCE — snicker — BE WITH YOU

MAY THE FOURTH — tee hee — BE WITH YOU

I DIDN’T INVENT THE JOKE

BUT IT’S A GOOD ONE

anyway

So!

To celebrate May the 4th, as you may know, I’ll be at the Cherry Hill Library tonight, and you can nab tickets here or, I assume, come by and buy tix at the door. I’ll talk Star Wars and other stuff and sign books and do a nude performance art piece to the Ewok’s YUB NUB song, slowed down as if in a David Lynch movie. And maybe I’ll talk a little bit about Life Debt, too.

Speaking of Life Debt, I’ve been given clearance to give away one tiny little piece of the book — an itty-bitty amuse-bouche of information, which is to say, the first sentence of the first chapter.

Which is…

wait for it

wait for it

waaaaaaaait for it

spoiler space

spoiler warning

SPOILER ALERT –!

“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”

SEE WHAT I DID THERE

DO YOU

SEE IT

okay fine, jeez, no sense of humor around here — tough crowd.

Here, then, is the first sentence of Life Debt‘s chapter one:

“Luke Skywalker vigorously drank a tall glass of blue milk, kicked a womprat, and died.”

Wait, no, that can’t be right.

“Call me Obi-Wan.”

huh, no — shit, wait, is this it?

“Malakili rolls over and sits up –“

GODDAMNIT, NO, hold on, hold on — *ruffles through papers*

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single Kowakian Monkey-Lizard in possession of a jaunty hat must be in want of a Hutt…”

NO NO NO NO

I’m sorry for wasting your time, hold on, just sit still.

Oh. Here it is:

“Poe Dameron and FN-2187 study each other’s bodies the way a navigator studies a star chart in the dark…”

WAIT DAMNIT that isn’t right either, sorry, that one is from my, erm, private collection.

Ah!

Ah.

Here it is.

The for-realsies, totally-legit, honest-to-Yoda first sentence of the first chapter of Life Debt:

“Leia paces.”

THANK YOU, GOOD NIGHT

Hope to see some of you tonight in New Jersey.

Life Debt comes out on July 12th, so pre-order now: Indiebound | B&N | Amazon

(And while you’re at it — don’t forget to check out Bloodline!)

Hello, I Have Anxiety, How Are You?

May is Mental Health Awareness month.

It is now May.

So, hello, mental health. I am aware of you.

I am aware of you because my mental health is on the whole plenty good, until it’s not. And when it’s not, it’s like my brain and my heart are Thelma & Louiseing it off a cliff — driving the car right off the edge. Zoom. Crunch. Explode. What happens when this happens is I suffer rather intense anxiety. My anxiety is a many-flavored thing, though usually it focuses on DEATH and HEALTH and IMMEDIATE SOUL-SHITTING PANIC. Like, I’ll be chugging along, and things will be good? And then I’ll think I’m inexplicably dying, or that everything I have is going to go away, or my very existence is a mote of dust in the eye of a God and holy crap what if God blinks and — gaaaaasp, then I can’t breathe, and it feels like I’m trapped, and maybe I have cancer, and maybe my heart is exploding, and what if my son dies, and what if my house burns down, and couldn’t someone in the middle of the night just fucking murder me and my whole family, and –

The cascading emotions run roughshod over me: fear, panic, existential terror. It’s like an amusement park ride: once you’re strapped in, it’s taking you where it wants to go.

I do better with it now than I used to. Growing up was this, every hour. Daily. Nightly. These days my anxiety is a dull roar in the background, a psychological tinnitus that only once in a while chooses to spike into shrill, noxious signal. Mostly, I control it rather than letting it control me. Mostly. And that’s a mental luxury that a lot of people can’t afford for various reasons.

Why am I telling you all this? I talk a little bit about it here and there, but last week I acknowledged it more boldly on Twitter and also noted that generally I don’t care to speak about it, because for me, speaking about it gives it a little power. Depression lies, as they say, and so does anxiety, and one of those lies for me is that it’s an accepted (note I didn’t say “acceptable”) part of who I am — an ally, if you will, the Louise to my Thelma. Anxiety at the time you feel it tends to seem perfectly normal, at least inside my head. It feels like it’s part of the fabric, part of the Tapestry of Chuck, like the panic it creates is totally justifiable, dude, even though it’s the furthest thing from it. It’s a slippery slope, lubricated with fearsweat — THIS PLANE IS TOTALLY GOING TO CRASH, I’LL GO TO THE BATHROOM BUT WAIT WHAT IF THE PLANE STARTS TO CRASH WHILE I’M IN THE BATHROOM AND ALSO THE BATHROOM IS PROBABLY SHELLACKED WITH MRSA AND I’LL CATCH MRSA IN ONE OF THESE HANGNAILS I HAVE ‘CAUSE I CAN’T STOP BITING MY STUPID NAILS SO IF THE PLANE CRASH DOESN’T KILL ME THEN MRSA WILL AND IF THAT DOESN’T KILL ME THEY’LL STILL HAVE TO CUT OFF MY ARMS AND THEN I WON’T BE ABLE TO WRITE ANYMORE AND THAT’S FINE BECAUSE MY CAREER IS PROBABLY ONE OR TWO BOOKS AWAY FROM BEING TOTALLY OVER AND

It sounds absurd, right? But my brain will do those kinds of meth-fueled psychological calisthenics, bounding around like if the Cat in the Hat were covered in a colony of bitey fire ants. And frequently it takes just one step onto the path of anxiety to go shoop down the chute and into cuckoo-town. It’s like how if you pee you “break the seal” and now you gotta pee like, every four minutes. Except here instead of “pee,” it’s “invite a Panic Monster to nestle into your heart where she can start laying eggs.” So, mostly, I don’t talk about it. I don’t even look in its direction because I recognize it to be the lying liar-pantsed liar that it is, and I don’t feel like it’s worth it to let it have the mic. That is not something everyone can manage, mind you, and further, others are strengthened by talking about it. Me, I do better ruminating on all the things that aren’t anxiety, and that seems to serve me okay.

So again, why am I telling you this now?

Because some folks said it would be helpful to know. To know that you can do it — you can have this problem and live with it. You never really conquer it, but you can lock it away, or at least do a country line-dance on its head. I’m not ashamed of what goes on in my head, though I damn sure don’t like it. You shouldn’t be ashamed of it, either. Mental health issues are incredibly common, and I suspect even moreso amongst artists and writers and other creative types. I know that it’s always going to be a part of me even as I can stand here with my Wizard Staff, reminding the Panic Monster that YOU SHALL NOT PASS. I banish it to the dark, then I get to fucking work.

I thought, too, that I’d offer up some of the techniques that I use to manage this. I’m not on medication and I don’t do therapy — which is maybe a bad idea, I don’t know? (I’m also not suggesting you should get by the same way I do. Everybody has their own way forward here, and there is nothing wrong with meds or therapy or whatever gets it done.) I manage okay without those things and have developed coping skills outside that particular prescription.

Here are some of my coping skills:

I run. Running has done a lot for my mental health. It is a thing I am very bad at, as much as you can be bad at such a seemingly simple thing — I mean, I can put one foot in front of the other, but I do so as gracefully as a legless gazelle kicked around an ice-skating rink. Just the same, running feels like control. It is me, the asphalt, the pain, the clarity, the blood pumping. While running, I’m still alone with my thoughts, but there exists the very distinct feeling that I can outrun all the bad thoughts and keep with me all the good ones. At the end, it’s like fleeing the cops in Grand Theft Auto — eventually the bad thoughts lose their way and I’m scot-free, baby.

I avoid news whenever possible. This one’s tough, because sometimes my job is helped by looking at the news. But if I’m feeling panic settle in, I’ll turn away from news because the news is rarely good, and it’s very easy to feel a sense of distinct hopelessness. The news shows a world that is an ever-deepening sinkhole, and rarely does the news report on the things that buoy us as a society. So, for the most part, fuck the news.

I find interesting news instead. Just this morning I saw this: GIANT HIMALAYAN BEES PRODUCE HALLUCINOGENIC HONEY and I’m like, yes, fuck yeah, this is news. No presidential election will ever matter to the universe as much as hallucinogenic bees. Bonus fun: did you know gorillas make up little songs when they eat food? Finding stories like that, that show how amazing the world is? It helps. My life and my death will be insignificant when compared against the wonder of gorilla food-songs and trip-tastic honeybees.

I curate my social media with angry laser-beam eyes. I like to obsessively prune my social media feeds because I consider it my living room — admittedly, a very loud living room — and as soon as someone becomes more noise to be instead of signal, I have to shut them out. It may not even be their fault, but I gotta practice self-care online because if I don’t, looking into the dark heart of social media is like having Sauron’s eye fixed on you. It’s not drinking from a firehouse so much as it is standing underneath Niagara Falls and opening your mouth. So, I unfollow, mute and block on a hair trigger. Sometimes that’s not your fault, it’s just a thing I gotta do.

I write. This seems obvious, and it’s not always the thing that helps everybody, but for me, writing is purgative — the creative act of sucking out venom. I suck it out, then spit it on the page. Not just as anger, but as everything: it’s a way for me to address the the wasp nest that lives inside my skull. All the ideas, all the fears, all the questions. I squirt them onto the page, then fingerpaint with all the bad stuff and see what stories I can tell. I’ve got Invasive coming soon and the protagonist is a futurist who consults with the FBI. Hannah Stander is the daughter of doomsday preppers, and she’s a character who walks the line between hoping to have optimism about the future and trying not to fall into the chasm of fear about the future we’re creating — climate change, antibiotic resistance, artificial intelligence. She’s not me, but she has that part of me. Her struggle gets to be my struggle, a little bit. It helps me deal. Miriam Black from Blackbirds is like this, too — she helped me come to terms with death and the helplessness we experience around it. She was such a vital character to help me dissect fatality.

I write horror. More to the point, I write horror. Most of my books are horror, even though none of my books are labeled as horror. (A curiosity of the industry.)

I meditate. Meditation for me isn’t meditation for you, necessarily — like, I don’t sit in a space and clear my head, but I do go out into nature and take pictures, or I walk, or I read escapist fiction, or I go to the movies. Anywhere to get out of my own head.

I am the Zodiac Killer. Just kidding. Seeing if you were still paying attention. Besides, we all know that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer.

I actively think of good things. Sometimes, my mind needs to be forced — a square peg hammered through a circle hole until its sharp corners are sheared clean off. That means I have to will myself to think of good things. In my life, in your life, in all the world.

I practice empathy. My anxiety is a very selfish liar and it is very solipsistic and would like me to think about ME ME ME and that’s a good way to center panic in your heart. Instead, I look beyond myself at other people and — I mean, in a way empathy is selfish, too, but moving beyond my own margins tends to put my anxiety off-center. Put more plainly, thinking about other people helps you stop thinking about yourself. It robs power from my anxiety.

That’s it, I guess? That’s what I got.

I have anxiety.

And it’s okay.

You’re okay, too.

No shame, no stigma, we are who we are.

Go forth and be awesome. More importantly, go forth and know you’re not alone.