Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 121

December 10, 2015

Fran Wilde: Editorial Marks, Explained!

Dear Chuck,


I heard you were feeling poorly so I stole the keys to your car shed blog again and made you a get-well Questionable Answer to All Your Publishing Questions.


QUESTION 3: WHERE THE @#%!%^&@ Do EDITORIAL MARKS COME FROM AND WHAT THE $@#@$@! DO THEY MEAN


The answer’s been right in front of our eyes for years, but I’ve only now decrypted the truth to those cryptic squiggles you see on manuscripts (and sometimes restaurant menus after I’ve been there, shhh don’t tell.).


No need to thank me. I’m guessing this will be GREAT to read in your fevered state!


editotial-marksC


 


* * *


Fran Wilde’s short stories have appeared at Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Uncanny Magazine, and in Asimovs’ and Nature. Fran also interviews authors about food in fiction at Cooking the Books, and blogs for GeekMom and SFSignal.


Her first novel is Updraft (Tor 2015). Her novella, “A Jewel and Her Lapidary” will be published by Tor.com Publishing in May 2016, and her 2nd novel, Cloudbound (Tor 2016) will follow in the fall.


Fran Wilde: Website | Twitter


Updraft: Indiebound | Doylestown Bookshop | Amazon | B&N

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Published on December 10, 2015 05:21

December 7, 2015

Holiday Shopping List: Recommend A Book

TIS THE SEASON something something reindeer.


So, Mister Scalzi does this very nice thing at his blog where he says hey come by and tell us about your book, and then you do, and good times. I am not quite as nice.


Hence, here’s how this works:


You can recommend one book.


This book can be a novel or a comic or a short story or whatever.


Traditional, self-published, whatever.


The rub is:


You cannot recommend your own book.


Nope. Can’t do it. Don’t do it.


*smacks your hand*


You will recommend someone else’s book that you loved.


Not your own. Someone else’s. Get it? Got it? Good.


One recommendation, please. One book only. Now let’s hear ‘em.

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Published on December 07, 2015 05:44

December 6, 2015

Gifts For Writers, 2015

gifts-for-writers2015


IT IS THAT TIME OF THE YEAR AGAIN. THAT GLORIOUSLY PINE-SCENTED, SANTA-FROTHED, BUTTER-LUBED CAPITALIST COOKIE DOUGH ORGY KNOWN AS “THE HOLIDAYS.”


(Yes, that’s right. I didn’t call it “Christmas.” The war is real, folks. The war is real.)


(Besides, Santa is for everyone. He is an Old Elf. He’s not some Young Hipster Elf like that skinny shitbird you have on your shelves, the one that spies on your children? He’ll kick the Shelf Elf’s bony asshole. No, Santa is eldritch. Santa predates all of humanity. We found him deep in the polar mantle, frozen there with his orichalcum sleigh and his eight automaton beast-deer — beings born of the Second Age of Earth, when Claus and the other Demi-Gods battled to — you know what? This is pretty irrelevant. Moving on.)


Anyway.


You may have a writer in your life.


And writers, as I find, are notoriously hard to buy for. I don’t know why that is. Is it because  writers are fickle and strange, like cats? Or because we need very little to do what we do, like dogs?


Point is, if you have one of these capricious weirdos in your life, you may require gift ideas. Something that isn’t “another blank notebook,” because if you are a writer like me, you have about 4,619 blank notebooks that people have given as gifts over the years.


SO HERE I AM, appearing at the time you need me most.


*appears*


*tap-dances*


How did I get in your house? Magic. Also, I broke the front window with a toaster. Why am I carrying a toaster? More magic. Also, you’re out of bourbon. Because I drank your bourbon.


Because bourbon is how magic.


No that’s not a sentence, shut up.


Whatever. Point is, here are some gift ideas for THE SCREECHING PENMONKEY IN YOUR LIFE.


1. Not Pneumonia

I have pneumonia and it sucks demon scrotum. Writing is a minimal task in terms of physical expenditure and while having pneumonia, even writing is hard. So, fuck pneumonia. Give them not pneumonia. Anything but pneumonia. Hell, maybe something that might combat pneumonia, like tangerines or cough syrup or a plastic territorial bubble. Or those antibiotics you stole from the local veterinarian’s office the last time you raided the place looking for ketamine, you freak.


2. Gift Certificate To Indie Bookstore

I am wont to say the phrase, Amazon is not your friend, but it’s also worth noting that indie bookstores often are a writer’s friend. As such, get them a gift certificate to the local indie store. Why not to Amazon? Because Amazon has everything. Literally everything. You give me $25 to spend and I’ll end up with a a mummified raccoon, a jockstrap full of jellybeans, and a Lemmy-from-Motorhead build-a-bear. But an indie bookstore gets the writer up off his ass and out of the house (just make sure he’s wearing his anti-pneumonia hazmat suit). And indie bookstores actually sell gasp books. Bonus: giving money to an indie bookstore is basically good karma.


3.  Coffee Subscription

I noted this one in last year’s Gift for Writers (2014), and I’m calling it again: YOU CAN GET COFFEE DELIVERED TO YOU MONTHLY. If there is ever proof that we are living in an amazing time, it is that. You can find a great list of coffee subscription services here, and some reviews of said services here. (For the record, I don’t much care for Blue Bottle. Liked ‘em when they were Tonx, but they got bought by BB and the quality and roast date suffered.) Also missing from those lists, a local roaster I love that offers subscriptions — Royal Mile.


4. Fine, Yes, Tea Is Lovely, Too

I am a total coffee snob and not at all a tea snob (I’ll seriously drink dirty gravel steeped in hot sewer water), but I’ve been upping my tea game this year thanks to Proper Tea Drinkers, like my pals from ‘Straya, Emma and Eliza. They turned me on to T2 Tea from Melbourne. Thing is, you can get T2 here in the US now, too. It is legit amazing stuff. Their Melbourne breakfast tea is maybe the nicest smelling thing I legit have ever done smellt. Oh! And there are tea subscription services, too. Consider non-tea subscriptions to accompany: chocolate bar subscription, a Latvian food subscription, and healthy snacks like Graze or Boxtera.


5. Mean Mugging

Sure, you could drink your coffee or tea out of any old thing — a mason jar, the skull of a sentimental foe, a jockstrap that once held a bunch of jelly beans — but really, I recommend FANCY MUG TECHNOLOGY. Which is to say, I am shameless and offer a variety of writer-themed mugs for sale. Examples: Certified Penmonkey, Art Harder (NSFW), Art Harder (SFW), The Secret of Writing (NSFW), Writer Juice, and the newest addition: CAFFEINE, MOTHERFUCKER. DO YOU SPEAK IT? Er that one is pretty obviously NSFW.


6. Chalk Paint

There’s that thing where writers always want to take notes but never know where to take them — a phone can be fidgety since autocorrect will maul hastily scribed notes (“What did I mean when I wrote ‘scabrous cloud wombat?'”), and a notebook is never around when you need it. So? Get a writer chalkboard paint. Said writer can turn HER ENTIRE WORLD INTO ONE GIANT CHALKBOARD. (Don’t forget brushes and, y’know, chalk. Like these cool chalk markers.)


7. Mod Notebook

Okay, fine, I said no notebooks and yet here I am YOU’RE NOT MY DAD, DAD. Except you are my Dad. And I need some money, so please send some. Anyway. The Mod Notebook is pretty nifty — fill it, send it off, they’ll digitize for you. Which you could admittedly do yourself, too, but whatever. Buy here or check out the site — works with various apps like Evernote.


8. Stylus

If you want a stylus for your device, might I recommend Pencil?


9. Take Notes Like A Librarian

Librarians, as we know, are basically wizards and most people never realize it. Nothing will give you the BIBLIOSORCERY possessed by a true-blooded librarian, but! You can take notes with these cool library loan cards. Why wouldn’t you do that? Do you hate libraries?


10. Moo

Business cards for writers are a dubious proposition. Writers like to hand these things out like they’re candy from a piñata, but they are rarely so useful, nor are they tasty like candy. (In fact, if you’re writer who has given me a business card, please know that your business card found an immediate home in the nearest trash receptacle. Nothing personal, but what am I going to do with it? Cut rails of coke?) Still, sometimes you need cards — cards to give to editors, agents, or other potential clients. GIVE THE GIFT OF MOO.


11. Writer Emergency Cards

I adore these. I use these. They are fun and adorable and useful. Designed by the very smart screenwriter, John August, the writer in your life will dig these. Go grabby grabby.


12. Rory’s Story Cubes

These are just a lot of fun to say. Like “rural juror” or “Bob Loblaw.” Anyway! These are dice to help facilitate storytelling and can help unstick the stuck wordsmith. Here’s the complete set. Do they actually work? Who gives a shit? It’s fun to roll dice. Just that simple physical act — and the triggering images on each die — might help kick loose some of the brain scree. Or, for a more word-driven version: Daniel Solis’ Story Dice! (I use and love those.)


13. Words for Pictures

Right now, I’m a total tourist in the town of COMIC WRITERS — like, I’m technically writing comics and getting paid, but I soooo don’t belong there. I’m still feeling my way around with little to no idea as to the architecture or topography of comic book storytelling. One book is presently helping me? Brian Michael Bendis’ WORDS FOR PICTURES. So good. And not just helpful for comic writers — helps you think visually and episodically. Great interviews with writers, artists and editors within the industry.


14. A Fucking Houseplant

No, not a houseplant for fucking, but rather, a fucking houseplant. Writers are more or less creepy cave trolls who live in these low-oxygen creativity tanks — we hunch over, wheezing and keening as we hammer out our weirdness onto the screen or the page. A houseplant will give us oxygen. It’ll give us some color. It’ll give us something to care about and a thing to talk to that isn’t a human being because really, most writers are introverts who would far rather talk to a houseplant (or cat or Roomba or spider or dead spider) than most other human beings.


15. Something Even Easier Than A Fucking Houseplant

Maybe your writer pal isn’t exactly Herr Doktor Greenthumb — okay, fine, here’s something even simpler: a self-contained aquatic ecosystem. No muss, no fuss, no nothing at all. Just stare at it. If you stare at it long enough, it will begin communicating with you telepathically, and soon you too will know the wishes of the Deep Ones. Bonus point: you can look at it as a prison for seamonkeys. And if you give into the idea of karma, you can further extrapolate and assume that those seamonkeys imprisoned in your glass sphere were once really bad people. “Hello, Donald Trump’s Dad,” you whisper against the glass. “Suffer, you briny fucker. Suffer.”


16. A Nice Water Bottle

I drink coffee, but beyond that I often forget to hydrate. And by the end of the day I am a brittle, desiccated thing, like a bug scorched dead by the sun. I like the Lifefactory brand. YMMV.


17. Massage

Sometimes an author really just needs a prostat… *checks notes* really just needs a regular ol’ massage. Like I said, we sit there all hunched up and dried out like crispy gremlins. Someone needs to work out the kinks. Get us the gift of massage. Prostate or otherwise. If you don’t wanna do a full massage — this hot/cold neckwrap is honestly a lifesaver.


18. Something Liquor-y

It’s almost cliched to recommend booze for your writer pal — and possibly unhealthy? — so, fine, okay, I’ll recommend something booze-adjacent. Since writers are themselves an occasionally embittered lot and may need a cocktail now and again, might I recommend this gift pack of Scrappy’s bitters? So good. Killer for cocktails. And metaphorically apt! Adding a dash of bitters to a drink is like adding conflict to a story — you don’t think you need it, and you instinctively want to avoid bitterness, but your instincts are wrongo, pal. Add bitters. Stir for conflict.


19. Adult Coloring Books

I was initially sort of put off by the idea of adult coloring books, assuming immediately that they were the refuge of people whose brains were eaten through by a variety of exotic parasites. That was me being an asshole because man, sometimes just dicking around with simple art can loosen up a gummy mind. Maybe you want one for stress relief. Or maybe one with some fucking owls all over it.  This one is called Unicorns Are Jerks, because why the shit not? Minor sadness: all of these coloring books are doing way way way better than my own books and pretty much all the books of all the people I know, thus proving to me I should be making coloring books instead of books with words in them. Extra bonus: Abbi Jacobson of Broad City fame has a New York City-themed coloring book and it’s pretty sublime.


20. LEGO

Don’t feel good about giving a coloring book? The writer in your life might want some LEGO bricks. A small container of interesting LEGO for one’s desktop gives idle hands something to do — I often demonize distractions for writers, but distractions are actually useful in small measure. Getting your hands around little plastic bricks frees up your mind to do some hardcore THUNKIN’.


21. Lumio Lamps

AHHH LOOK AT THESE FUCKING LAMPS. THEY LOOK LIKE BOOKS. THEY SO PRETTY. JESUS GOD I WANT THEM ALL. This little one is extra cool because it can also power your devices. I do not possess any of these and now I’m sad because nobody loves me enough.


22. Paper & Pen Subscription

Literally is what it says — a monthly subscription where you get paper and pens and other writerly things. Alternately, if you’d just rather pens — well, there’s InkDrop.


23. Speaking Of Pen & Paper — RPGs!

I love pen and paper roleplaying games for getting the STORYFRUIT A-JUICING — it just fires all the synapses for me. Now, that being said, if you want something very explicitly driven in this direction, I turn you to: Primetime Adventures! This is an indie meta-game where you actually design a season of a TV show that you make up. Great fun way to explore story mechanics.


24. Books About Writing

I know. I’m shameless but HEY I WROTE A BOOK AND IT’S CALLED THE KICK-ASS WRITER AND *gesticulates wildly* maybe the writer in your life would like it. Or maybe they would despise it and use that hate as fuel to power their manuscript. I dunno. Other good writing books: Wonderbook, Writing 21st Century Fiction, and Ray Bradbury’s Zen In The Art Of Writing. Oh and the writing-related Storybundle collection is still going till the end of the year.


25. One Good Non-Fiction Book

As I’ve noted in the past, writers have the Human Centipede-like habit of consuming and regurgitating the same genres of fiction. But non-fiction affords the author a new look into something unexpected. Choose a random non-fiction book to open new doors of thought for the author pal in your life. Might I recommend the books of Mary Roach as a starter?


Extra Credit: AN AXE

Something vintage and cool, like this one! Here you’re saying, “Uhh, why are you giving the writer an axe?” Because that sounds like a bad idea. Next thing you know, the writer’s output will be pages of ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACKIE BOY AXE SOME HARD QUESTIONS and then he’s chopping down doors and chasing kids through hedge mazes. But no! That’s not the point. Here’s why you give an axe to a writer: because you tell them, “This is for chopping your way through writer’s block.” It’s a violently artful way of telling the writer in your life that you believe in them, goddamnit. Bonus points: will chop zombies in case of apocalypse.

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Published on December 06, 2015 10:36

December 3, 2015

Star Wars Cover Reveal Time!


Here, then, is the cover to Star Wars: Aftermath — Life Debt.


Also, Zeroes is a Bookbub deal of the day!


And go buy it, because I have pneumonia and that would magically heal me!


Okay, not really.


But go get it.


Or I’ll cough on you.


WENDIGO, OUT.

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Published on December 03, 2015 12:51

December 1, 2015

Hack Cough Gargle Blargh

FYI: blog closed for rest of the week, I think. Got me the PNEUMONIA all up in my lungmeats, and gonna take it easy. Thanks, folks. See you on the other side! Er, of the illness, ideally. No, uhh, “the other side.”

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Published on December 01, 2015 14:01

November 30, 2015

“I Meant What I Said When I Said The Soup Was Good,” I Ejaculated Most Fizzily


I am sick with some kind of plague, so you will have to endure the reek of my crankypants.


ENDURE IT.


*shakes crankypants at you, bathing you in rage-stink*


Anyway.


I read an article. (God, it always starts that way, doesn’t it?)


Many of my kind have shared this article.


You can read this article here. It is dumb.


The tl;dr of that article is kids being encouraged to cut out simple words in favor of more complex ones. “Expressive” words. Showy words strutting their butts around like pretty pretty peacocks. Sometimes they’re not just encouraged, but rather, punished for failing to do so.


I CALL HORSESHIT AND SHENANIGANS. HORSCHTNANIGANS.


Listen, I get it. I love language.


Language is a circus of delight. It’s like a buffet of food. You don’t always want to eat meat and potatoes. You want to try new things, and encouraging kids — or adults! — to find new ways to express themselves is a win. The breadth and depth of our language is a rich garden with loamy soil. All manner of things can grow up and out of that bed of linguistic nutrients.


Here, though, let me quote a few passages from the article:


English teachers were once satisfied if they could prevent their pupils from splitting infinitives. Now some also want to stop them from using words like “good,” “bad,” “fun” and “said.”


“We call them dead words,” said (or declared) Leilen Shelton, a middle school teacher in Costa Mesa, Calif. She and many others strive to purge pupils’ compositions of words deemed vague or dull.


“There are so many more sophisticated, rich words to use,” said (or affirmed) Ms. Shelton, whose manual “Banish Boring Words” has sold nearly 80,000 copies since 2009.


Her pupils know better than to use a boring word like “said.” As Ms. Shelton put it, “ ‘Said’ doesn’t have any emotion. You might use barked. Maybe howled. Demanded. Cackled. I have a list.”


and


Now he automatically hunts for more picturesque language. “Rather than saying, ‘This soup was good,’ you can say something like, ‘The soup was delectable,’ which really enhances it,” Josh instructed. “It gives it sort of this extra push.”


One recent afternoon after school, Josie and Josh agreed to take a stab at editing famous authors, starting with the closing words of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “….yes I said yes I will Yes.”


Head down, her pigtails brushing the paper, Josie examined the phrase and then suggested a small amendment: “…yes I hollered yes I will Definitely.”


and finally, oh god


Robert C. March, a writing teacher at Atkins High School in Winston-Salem, N.C., stands by his list. He has banned “I,” “you,” “we,” “why” and “it,” among others. Mr. March makes clear on his Web page that he means business: “Any banned word, or contraction, that appears in a work submitted to me will count as -5 (minus five) points off the total grade.”


Holy shit, what.


The gall to edit James Joyce.


The ego it takes to claim that simple words are ‘dead’ words.


The cruelty of punishing kids for using common, everyday, essential words.


This isn’t about expression.


This is about elitism — about embracing some faux-literary divide and stepping over one-penny blue-collar words so you can instead reach for the five dollar words in the jar on the high shelf.


The problem here is that it assumes our expression is limited by the simplicity of our language. It is not. You can express complex ideas with simple words. You can tell whole stories or give voice to complicated emotions with language that is clear, direct, and confident. The soup is good is a fine fucking sentence, I’ll have you know. It is clear. You don’t need to say ‘delectable’ because delectable is a fancy-pancy froo-froo word, one that is arguably redundant. You’d be better off directing kids to learn how to express themselves not with more complicated words, but rather with complicated images, metaphors, ideas. If a teacher feels that “the soup is good” fails to go far enough, have them describe how good, or how it makes them feel. Why is it good? Why do you like it? How does it make you feel and to what does it compare?


Context is more meaningful than painting up your words to be pretty.


Pretty words are often very nice, indeed, and also very hollow.


Characters say things and do things and nothing about that limits the power of either. What a character says and does is far more significant than how that character says or does it. The language is there to serve the idea, to give it clarity and beauty. The idea is not there to serve at the pleasure of the language. Don’t let the words gum up the meaning of what you’re trying to say.


I mean, for fuck’s sake. Sure, once in a while a character will yell or bark or spit a word out like it was something foul on the tongue. Once in a while a character will be pompous enough to believe food should be called ‘delectable’ because a word like ‘good’ could never be sufficient. Certainly big words are not to be avoided just because they’re big words — but we should cleave to them because they are the right words, not simply large and fancy and ever-so-precious. I’m using some fancy words here in this post. I do it because I like them but more because I think they are appropriate. They serve me. They create and enhance meaning.


Most of the time, simple words will do.


Simple words can be strung together to form complex sentences and complicated ideas. Some of the most astonishing poetry is the most straightforward — not the showiest, not the splashiest. That is what we should be striving to teach kids — and, further, to teach upcoming writers. Expression is more than the sum of word choice. And word choice is not garish makeup to slather across your paragraphs and pages just because you think it was too crude and not pretty enough. Don’t punish kids because they aren’t high-falutin’ enough for you. Sophistication is not well-demonstrated by purple prose. Work harder. Think bigger. Eschew the elitism of language.


Otherwise, fuck you.


Is that simple enough for you?

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Published on November 30, 2015 10:30

November 29, 2015

NaNoWhoNow?

AND IT IS OVER.


Er, over-ish.


I mean, you still have today and tomorrow yet.


But, by and large, National Novel Writing Month has reached its conclusion for many and will close up shop soon enough. So, as always, time to gaze back and reflect.


How’d you do?


What did you learn?


Where will you go from here?


Let’s see some evaluation. Not just in terms of you as a writer, but in terms of how utilizing this month was for you — in other words, evaluate NaNoWriMo, too.


Drop in the comments and give me 20. Or something.


(Here I will casually remind: 30 DAYS IN THE WORD MINES is still 33% off until December 1st with code NANOWRIMO, and the NaNoWriMo Storybundle is still running, too.)

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Published on November 29, 2015 09:27

November 27, 2015

Flash Fiction Challenge — #talesfromblackfriday

This may be my favorite holiday of the year.


No, not because of THE SWEET DEALS.


But rather, because of the fiction that grows out of it.


If you don’t know #talesfromblackfriday, well, it’s a bit of a tradition, now. I’m not even sure when I started it? I wanna say three years ago, but maybe it’s been longer. It’s certainly taken on its own life, since then, which is awesome.


Here’s what you do:


Go to Twitter. Don’t have The Twitters? Now’s a good time to get an account.


Then, tell a horror-ish story about Black Friday using the hashtag, #talesfromblackfriday.


Here’s an example, and here, and here — or, just go peruse the hashtag.


The tales you tell can be short (a single tweet) or long. They can be Night Vale-ish, or more cosmic horror-y, or Twilight Zoney — or, really, whatever you want to do with it.


Go. Descend into the retail labyrinth. Shuffle past the snapping doors.


FIND YOUR DEALS.


TELL YOUR TALE.

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Published on November 27, 2015 04:03

November 25, 2015

In Which We Are Thankful For The Legacy Of Others

Listen, so there’s some guy in YA who stepped in it — the long and short is, he came out of nowhere, sold a six-figure debut out of a self-published YA book, and then took some time to step up to the podium to maybe kinda sorta shit on young adult literature and bluster about female characters and — well, you know how it goes. This is not really new. If you want to follow the story back more completely, you’d do well by looking at the Twitter feed of someone like @bibliogato, who is unpacking some of this stuff right now and linking to other smart people. Go look. (And you can also check out the #MorallyComplicatedYA hashtag.) (Ooh, also, Victoria Aveyard has a good pulling-apart of the problem here at her Tumblr.)


I’d like to speak about this in a more general sense — and, quite likely, I’m going to be talking more implicitly to my fellow WHITE DUDES who are living up on HETERO WHITE DUDE MOUNTAIN, because while this problem is by no means exclusive to us it certainly seems to gather around us like a cloud of flies who are feasting upon our eye-watering ego-stink.


Privilege is a weird thing.


It teaches us by example that we own the house — the house metaphorically being, well, everything all around us. As such, we view all the things in the house as ours. We own this stuff, we think. We own these rooms. And so we move freely from room to room without hesitation. We muddy the carpets because they’re ours and we can dirty them all we want, goddamnit. We control what’s on the TV, we get to decide what everyone eats, we determine where to piss (toilet, toilet seat, potted plant, sink, the northeast corner of every room).


This is of course an illusion. A pretty gross one, though one that society often goes out of its way to maintain (in part because hey patriarchy and yes the patriarchy is real as it takes very little to see that men control a whole lot more than women and hey by the way, Scott Adams, you wonky Dilbert-fucker, the fact that women possess sexual consent and agency does not make our world some kind of dystopian lady-realm).  It also would seem to give us license to saunter boldly into a space that’s new to us and pretend like it’s new to everybody. We take a shit in it and pretend we’re planting a flag instead of, y’know, taking a giant shit where other people are already hanging out. “I claim this space in the name of me!” you scream, hauling up your drawers and leaving behind a steaming present while ignoring everyone else standing around gaping at the horror-struck literal shit-show you just performed.


You must unlearn what you have learned, Jedi.


This isn’t your manifest destiny. You’re entering into spaces that have already been built and shaped by people who aren’t you. You’re not colonizing it — except maybe only in the grossest ongoing historical sense, where you invade territory and overpower those who dwell there already. And you damn sure shouldn’t come into a space with the desire to “fix” it, either. I wrote a YA novel about a teen girl and crime-flavored moral complications. I was not the first to do it and I will not be the one to put the capstone on it. Neither will you, rando. I didn’t fix it. I didn’t make it better. I don’t own it. I’m sharing it. And I’m sharing it by the grace of those who came before me. (And I don’t shit on genre work, or teenagers, or Twilight or Hunger Games or any of it, because I don’t get to exist as I do without them.)


You do not honor or create your own success by ignoring or crapping on the successes of those who came before. That is gross and weird. Don’t do that. Be humble. Look back and point others to look that way. Look all around you at the present and look ahead, too. See that you are not alone — you are not the peak of this mountain and you are not the owner of this house nor its sole occupant.


It’s like borrowing a ladder from your neighbor and then pretending that you built it. Or worse, pretending that you invented the concept of the ladder, or that the mere act of you ascending its rungs has improved it in some incalculable, cosmic way. (Then you kick the ladder away to make sure nobody else ever climbs to the same height. Jerk.)


Don’t be crappy.


Give respect to others.


Admire and acknowledge their success.


Do not overtake their achievements and claim them for yourself.


Whoever you are, see yourself as part of a whole and not the sum of it.


You owe them. They don’t owe you.


Give them thanks, too — that in the spirit of tomorrow’s holiday, perhaps. (Though here I could probably get into the sick moral tangle of a holiday where colonizing pilgrims took over native lands and probably pretended like they invented turkey and corn and dinner, which is maybe altogether more apropos — but, ahem, that can be a conversation for another day.)


In fact, let’s take a moment below to give some thanks to some YA writers and books — in particular, if you care to uncover them, “morally complicated YA” novels, particularly YA novels by women. Pop ‘em in the comments below, talk about what those books mean to you. 

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Published on November 25, 2015 09:23

November 23, 2015

Zer0es Price Drop, The Goodreads Choice Awards, And More


Some quick news bits:


First, Zer0es on Amazon Kindle is $1.99 for the week — ending Cyber Monday, I believe! Feel free to go check it out, and if you care to spread the word, then I will Cyber Hug you. I mean, only if you want. ONLY CONSENSUAL CYBER-HUGS. Otherwise, it’ll be a long-distance cyber-high-five. Anyway! If you want a book about five very different hackers going up against a sinister self-aware NSA surveillance program, please to enjoy for under two bucks, limited time only, free Cinnabon with purchase wait not so much that last part.


Second, the Goodreads Choice Awards is still open for voting until the end of today. And AFTERMATH was written in during the last round (yay). So, go vote for it or any other book that you love. Lots of great books demanding your attention there.


Third, I’ll be at Main Point Books in Bryn Mawr this coming Saturday at 10AM for Small Business Saturday — lots of bookstores are having authors hang out that day, so check with your local indies. Love your local bookstore, folks.


Finally, had a great event in Charlotte this past week courtesy of Queens University, where I actually attended school when I was a WEE, BARELY-BEARDED COLLEGIATE. Thanks to Mike Kobre and Melissa Bashor for having me, and to the great engaged audience (including members of the 501st!). Thanks to Park Road Books for selling books, too. Plus got to see some old friends (who I got to spend far too little time with thanks to a very limited schedule).

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Published on November 23, 2015 09:08