Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 122

NaNoWriMo Challenge: A Snippet Of Your Work, If You Please

So, Friday I wasn’t able to lock and load a new flash fiction challenge — I got back too late from traveling, and whilst on the road it’s incredibly difficult to actually work on new blog stuff (WordPress in mobile format makes that trickier than I’d like). But, really, that’s probably okay — the flash challenges go by the wayside during the month of November for obvious reasons.

As such, I’d like to posit a different challenge:

Go to your online space.

Grab 1000 words of your NaNoWriMo work-in-progress (or, really, even if you’re not participating, any WIP of yours), and slap those 1000 words online for all to see.

Grab the 1000 best words — or, at least, the ones with which you are the happiest.

Then link that post back here in the comments.

That’s it.

No criticism necessary.

Just sharing the work. Camaraderie and commiseration.

DO IT NOW OR YOU GET THE HOSE

Eddy Rivas: Bad Writing Habits I Learned From Video Games (Plus A Few Good Ones, Too)

Eddy Rivas is one of the writers behind Red Vs. Blue, and it seems only appropriate that he’s here to talk about writing habits both good and bad he got from video games.

Bad: Tutorial Levels

You’ve just started a new game. You’re a zombie monkey slaying space marine with biceps that border on cancerous. It’s time to start teaching those undead monkeys who’s boss in this galaxy, but first, you’re going to have to listen to a technician teach you how to look up. And then down. And then maybe around in a circle for good measure (sometimes those biceps mess with your muscle memory).

The technician explains a bunch of Shit You Already Know about the world you’re about to lay to waste with amazing futuristic weaponry fine-tuned for ultimate zombie monkey destruction. You humor the kid because the game just started and you’re still not sure which button you should press to sprint headlong into adrenaline-fueled heroism.

This learning and teaching phase is somewhat necessary to orient a player with the mechanics of a game world, but makes your writing more hopelessly stuck than a beached whale who just ate its own weight in donuts. One of the things I have to ask myself when laying down info in the first chapter of a new project: does the reader absolutely need to know this information for the story to make sense at this moment?

Often, because I try to be clever, the biggest offender of this is dialogue between two characters that no sane person would actually utter in day-to-day conversation, like:

“Joe. You’re my brother-in-law and my partner in zombie monkey slaying. We went through training together at monkey slaying academy.”

I’m pretty sure Joe would look at you as if you were having a stroke, before wondering if maybe you’ve got the zombie monkey sickness. If it feels like it belongs in a videogame tutorial, it’s probably best to tuck away for future use.

We all skip those levels anyway.

Bad: Vanilla Character Builds

Because I’m a coward whose favorite type of ice cream is vanilla, I tend to play it safe when it comes time to build my characters in RPGs. This is most troublesome when assigning attribution points. Afraid to miss out on any particular stat (what if I need my intelligence high later on for the testicle-burning spell that I’ll probably never use because it requires too many skill points), I create a character more boring than AAA video games’ brown-haired white guy.

Unfortunately, this middle-of-the-road attribute character creeps into my writing as well. There have been times when I’m reading over my first drafts and have to ask the painful question: “why else should I root for this guy, besides the fact that he’s who we meet on page one?” I don’t always have an answer.

A good friend of mine just started Fallout 4 with a character who has max luck and max intelligence, and basically zero of every other stat. I’d be too terrified to play through the game that way, but it certainly is an interesting approach to creating a memorable character. What if we thought about our own characters in that way, maximizing particular traits to the derailment of every other part of their lives? We might end up with more Miriam Blacks, a true force of nature who tornados her way through each of her books from start to finish.

This is also one of the things I love about Red vs. Blue, the longest running show on the Internet (you’ll have to forgive my fanboy-ing, I literally wrote the book on it). The show’s characters basically have one trait maxed to 111, with all other traits somewhere in the negative threshold. It makes each character memorable and easily identifiable (the brightly colored armor helps, too), and is no doubt a huge contributing factor to why the show has outlasted so many others of its kind, and why it’s attracted an audience that rivals some of cable’s biggest shows.

Bad: Follow the Waypoint

“Master Zombie Monkey Killer, we need you to run over to Bullshit Canyon to take care of a generic problem because of Reasons. Clear out as many of those zombie monkeys as you can, and may God have mercy on your soul when you find out the secret twist that this is all leading to.”

In videogames, it’s usually pretty critical to have a destination marker of some kind (unless you’re in a Call of Duty, which is basically a long hallway disguised as a videogame, filled with explosions and bad guys). Much of the design of every space is meant to subtly (or not-so-subtly) push you forward, telling you where to be and when to trigger the next event.

I tend to treat my characters the same way.

While I’m a huge fan of outlines, one of the trappings of mapping everything out beforehand is that you start treating story beats like videogame waypoints. “Go here,” you tell the main character. “Learn this startling revelation.” “Join in on this rising action, fool.” “Get all up on that denouement.” But stories need to be more organic than that.

Trust me, I get it – we want to be sure we know where the story is heading at all times, so we can make it easier on ourselves. But what I usually find is the sections that are working the least are the ones that I plopped into the middle of the story from a very early stage, completely unwilling to budge on its inclusion. I created a waypoint, and I told the main character to get there because of Reasons.

Good: Co-Op Makes Everything Better

My regular Destiny fireteam bros hates me, because I refuse to do any mission by myself. I’m the needy guardian, constantly pestering people to join me to run through the new daily, even if it’s something that I’m totally capable of doing on my own.

What can I say, I love a good co-op experience.

In the same way that certain games become exponentially more fun the more humans you add to your play session (Borderlands comes to mind), our stories become instantaneously infused with tension and fire when we pair our heroes up with someone else – and the more conflicting their ideologies or goals, the better.

It might make sense to travel alone through a wasteland in a videogame, but our characters need other humans to butt heads with. They need someone else standing on the other side of the central conflict, or someone who sees the central conflict in a different way than they do, to really throw some lighter fluid into every scene. I can’t tell you how many of my early drafts put my main character traveling from point A to point B by herself, mulling over what happened in the previous chapter or wondering what’s going to happen in the chapter that follows. I’m usually left wondering who I can put in her path that might really piss her off her ruin her day even further.

So really it’s not that much different from playing co-op games at all.

Good: The Steady Build

The best videogames, like the best stories, meticulously build on themselves until the final chapters. What a good game does in the background is teach you how to play and defeat its next challenge, drip-feeding you new mechanics and variations to the ones you thought you’d previously mastered.

Nowhere is this displayed better than in the Portal games, which are basically tutorials for how to play the Portal games. By the end of each game, there is a zen like moment in the final chapters where you are using every jumping, portal-ing, twisting, momentum-gaining trick in the book to make you feel like the ultimate badass. It’s a steady, methodical build that gets you there, but one that pays off because the game is delivering on what it promised from the very start.

The best writing does this as well. It’s more than foreshadowing, and more than simply paying off a plot twist that was so subtly hinted back on page 2. The best stories build on themselves, creating a feedback loop of character motivation, central conflict and overarching theme that’ll eventually blow the speakers and send you careening through the air like Marty McFly. There’s a similar Portal-like zen moment that happens when you’re in the middle of a book that has also pulled this off, and there’s honestly nothing else quite so satisfying.

So the next time you boot up Zombie Monkey Killer, pay attention to how you’re being guided to the next zombie monkey to annihilate, what you’re learning to do and what comes next. Now turn that same attentive eye to your story.

You might just learn a thing or two about your own writing – for better or worse.

* * *

Eddy Rivas is a writer from Houston, Texas and the author of Red vs. Blue: The Ultimate Fan Guide, after being a fan of the show for more than a decade. A copywriter by trade, he moonlights as a writer for a number of web productions. His contributions to online video include Rooster Teeth’s Red vs. Blue, X-Ray & Vav and Day 5, as well as Web Zeroes, Revision 3’s first scripted sitcom, which he also starred in. When he’s not at work, playing video games or training in Krav Maga, Eddy writes for The Know, a popular gaming news show on YouTube.

Red Versus Blue: The Ultimate Fan Guide: Indiebound | Amazon

Further Thoughts On Your Story’s Midpoint, Starring Darth Vader

Yesterday, I wrote ten tips to get you tightening up the middle of your story, and the way to do that is to focus on the midpoint of the narrative. Right? Right.

I HAVE MORE THOUGHTS. SIT COMFORTABLY. STRAP IN. PLEASE HOLD STILL AS ROBOTS ADMINISTER MY THOUGHTS TO YOUR BRAIN WITH AN IDEA-INJECTOR.

The midpoint, as I noted, is not a long flat line — it’s not a stretch of horse-killing swamp or a sad pair of rain-soaked underwear hanging on a clothes line. It’s a knife in the table. It’s a sword cutting a rope. It’s a portcullis slamming down or a heart ripped out of a ruptured chest. It is a breach. It is drama and conflict. It is a state change, a pivot, a curtain pulled back to reveal the real show that’s been playing all along.

But it’s something else, too.

The midpoint creates tension between the first half and the second half of the story.

Let’s say you built two structures — towers, maybe — that will stand poorly on their own. We have a tree like this in our yard — two massive forking trunks that will inevitably fracture. The way we keep that from happening, and the way you would keep those two towers from falling, is by cabling them together. You let the weight of each pull against one another. They’re always just about to fall but never do, because of the tension held in that cable. Your story is like this.

The first half of your book is the beginning of the tale — the inciting incident, the introduction of the characters, the revelation of the problem. And then it’s what builds up from that. The second half of the story is a difficult, dangerous move to resolution. Maybe it’s a further climb or an uncontrolled descent, but the point is, you’ve got the end and climax coming, and you’re working toward that. The characters have taken agency. The stakes are bigger, or maybe they’re different than anyone thought they were. The midpoint provides tension between the build up of the first half and the unspooling of the second half. It is the cable forcing tension between the beginning and the end, and letting the weight of each provide that tension.

Practically speaking, that means that the midpoint is momentous. Something has to happen here. It isn’t just talk. It isn’t hemming and hawing. But it isn’t just some random event, either. A hard choice arises and must be made. A revelation arrives, or better yet, is forced. A character’s weakness is exploited. The character takes agency for herself, or sacrifices something. The character reaches a nadir and must climb out of it — or climbs to what he believes is the pinnacle and then is knocked from a great height. The midpoint must be a state change for the narrative — things go from solid to liquid, from order to chaos (or the reverse, sometimes). Something big has to change. Sometimes, everything changes at the midpoint. Character in particular is key to the midpoint. The big change isn’t just something that happens to the universe. It’s something that urges the characters or is urged by them. It’s linked to them, their goals, their problems. It exposes them, or demands they take action, or destroys their expectations. It may change their goal or even change who the characters believe themselves to be.

In the Star Wars original trilogy, that midpoint represents Luke shifting from believing Darth Vader is some faceless enemy to realizing that he is his father. It is the moment when he starts to shift his goal from defeating Darth Vader to believing he must redeem him. It is both so much better and so much worse than he ever knew. A straightforward physical goal becomes a complex, emotional one. Plus, the stakes are raised across the board. And our heroes, not the Rebellion, suffer a great loss at Cloud City. Han is gone — his debts have caught up with him. Leia is left reeling. Lando betrays them and then doubles back to betray the Empire. C-3P0 is in pieces. Vader, too, hits this midpoint. He has had a similar revelation from a different angle — he knows that he has a son, and he chooses not to kill him but instead to try to recruit him to the Dark Side. And he fails at it! It’s like Lucas kicked the story right off a cliff. That moment is huge! It ties the two ends of the whole story together. (The entire middle film of Empire Strikes Back does this really well, actually. It proves quite capably that the middle of a story needn’t just be filler.)

Here, then, is an exercise for you –

Pick a story. Movie, comic, book, whatever.

Or something you’re currently writing.

Identify in the comments –

What’s the midpoint?

What happens? Why is it momentous? What is the shift?

GO.

Welcome To The Midpoint Of Your Novel: Now What?!

We tend to think of our stories as:

YEAH MAN WOOO BOOM INCITING INCIDENT AS THE TALE BEGINS.

And then:

YEEHAW FUCK YEAH IT’S THE END IT’S AN EVEN BIGGER BOOM AND ALSO A KABLAMMO AND THEN KSSHAOW AND FRRRBZZZT AND AHHH, NGGGGH SWEET CLIMAX.

We have these two moments — dramatic beginning and epic ending — and in the middle is…

What?

Often, we treat it like it’s a sagging clothesline. Dipping down in the middle with the weight of all that hangs upon it — supposedly clean clothes dragging in the dirt.

No. Fuck that shit, George. You must revise how you think of your story’s middle. It needn’t be some untended swamp, fetid and formless, in which your story will become mired.

Instead, think of it as:

The midpoint.

The middle of your story is not a straight line going up, down, or on a level plane. The middle of your story is a thing with shape. It has peaks and valleys all its own. It is not a two-dimensional line, but rather, it swoops and turns and loops like a roller coaster. (Bonus read: an older post talking about narrative architecture and the shape of story.) The midpoint has topography, man. It is not an invitation to let the story go lazy and loose but rather to keep it moving, up and down, left and right, through conflict and drama.

Here, then, are some quick tips to keep the middle of your book zipping and clipping along:

1. Do what Delilah says. (I had a similar point here, but it was wordier and more profane. Go read hers, which is as taut as the rubber band you wear on your braces. In fact, most times you can probably just go listen to her say stuff instead of whatever dumbness of mine.)

2. You know that thing in your book where you’re about to dwell over-long in one of the valleys? You’ve got all this plot-flavored stuff to explain and all these transitions to go through and the journey from Point A to Point Z feels long, so long? Skip it. Consider this a narrative exercise — leap the valley and jump right to the next peak. Meaning, get to the next cool part, and summarize — swiftly, now! — how the story got there.

3. Don’t shy away from the slow parts where you breathe some oxygen into the story, though. You need a little oxygen, if only because it’s flammable and you might need it to blow up the room later. A slow spot is okay — but even the slow spots need to be relevant and revelatory. Or at the bare minimum: interesting. Always. Be. Interesting.

4. Drama is conflict that is character-driven. Seize it. Characters lie, cheat and steal. They swindle and betray. They love when they shouldn’t and let hate take them over. They have affairs. They have lapses in judgment — some tiny, some huge, all consequential to the tale. They want, they need, they desire. They have problems. Exploit all of this. (Note that exploiting it too much leads to melodrama, not drama — though in certain story modes, melodrama can work, too.) The middle of your story is fertile for this kind of character shenanigans.

5. Rhythm is created when you alternate things. This is true in writing even a single paragraph — you write a long sentence here, a short one, a short one, a medium-sized one, etc. Then a short paragraph or series of dialogue bits with another big paragraph. This is true too in the shape of the story — a big chapter next to a small one, a slow moment followed by a fast one, a bit of character introspection that leads into an action scene. The middle sometimes falls prey to a gross uniformity, which leads to a loss of rhythm. Do not let the middle be monotone. Look at the shape of music. Then listen to it — listen to how music handles its center. Ape that.

6. The midpoint is a knife stuck suddenly in the center of a dinner table — thwack! It is a dramatic breach — there, at each end of the table are the beginning and the climax. Two guests dining. Between which is a fucking knife stabbed into the hard wood. Why is it there? Examine the knife. Exploit it. Find the knife in your narrative. What is the blade stuck in the middle? What does it say? What conflict emblemizes it? Seize that edge.

7. The thing you think is the actual end of your book? Bring it to the midpoint. Sounds extreme, but try it — drag it forward and plant it smack in the middle. Now the latter half of the book is unclaimed and unknown territory. It is unimagined by both you and the reader. Who knows what lurks there? HERE THERE BE ENDER DRAGONS.

8. The midpoint is not just a knife — it’s a catapult. What I mean is this: an event will take the characters and launch them into the next half of the story. The event must propel them — it must give them dramatic urgency, it must fling them forward. The stakes are upped or changed. The plan is ruined. All seems lost, or a victory that was won is now false. The word “change” is key, here. A change of state is significant — something has shifted, and now the playing field is different. Maybe the whole goddamn game is different.

9. Behold and correct passivity. I make a lot of noise where characters have to be active over passive, but there is a middle-ground here where a character is reactive. Meaning, the story presents them with a problem external to them and they are forced to react accordingly. Still, though, at a certain point the character has become active over reactive — not necessarily “gaining the upper-hand,” but gaining agency. The midpoint is an excellent time for exactly this. It represents just the sort of turning point readers seek in the middle of the story.

10. Throw out the rules. Not necessarily the internal story rules (which may be unseen but should remain consistent) — but your overall plan for them. Got an outline? Now’s a good time to scrap it. Writing is often an act of constantly checking your gut. I can feel when I think the story is starting to go boggy — I trust my instinct and I act on that. When that happens, I search for a way to break things I did not expect to break. I jump out of the plane with no parachute acquired. I find a character to kill, a thing to blow up, a relationship to begin or detonate — I reach out blindly for the toys in my sandbox to see what I can do to smash them together, change their story and modify the action. Fuck my plan. Screw my outline. The only thing that matters is whether or not the story is working right there on the page. Midpoint is a great check-in time for this. When in doubt? Improvise, escalate, and ‘asplode stuff. *hits big red comical button*

Ta-da! Ten tips. Use ‘em or lose ‘em.

Now go write more stuff.

Reminder:

30 DAYS IN THE WORD MINES is a 30-day writing regimen. $2.99 at Amazon, or 33% off directly if you use coupon code NANOWRIMO.

The NaNoWriMo Storybundle is live — 13 books with another 12 if you meet the $25 threshold. You will note that the bonus tier contains one of my books so go grabby-grabby.

Finally, if you want a lot of my tips and tricks and DUBIOUS WORDTHINK agglomerated, look no further than The Kick-Ass Writer, out now from Writer’s Digest: Indiebound or Amazon.

Before You Share It, Google It

Imagine that Person A has a sandwich.

He says to me, “Damn, this sandwich is delicious. Best sandwich I have ever eaten.” He describes its ingredients in detail: a bounty of meats and cheese and rare mustards, mm-mm-mm.  Then he says, “We should all share this sandwich.” And you think, dang, that’s very nice of him.

So, you take a quarter of the sandwich for yourself and then you pass the rest along. Maybe you’re hungry, so you take a bite. Or maybe you decide to wait for later and let someone else eat it.

If only you have peeled back the bread and looked inside because it’s just — I mean, it’s just full of scat. Turtle turdlets and otter dung and the sloppy mess from an irritable gopher.

Don’t worry, nobody really fed you a shit-filled sammy.

But also, definitely worry, because the truth is much worse.

Truth is, the internet’s informational sharing mechanism is pretty much that. It’s a lot of people passing shit sandwiches around, ignorant of or pretending they’re not actually shit sandwiches.

Given the horror show present in places around the globe recently — Beirut, Paris, and so forth — the informational sharing mechanism has been like ordure fertilizing a garden of only ordure. During times of crisis and concern, the misinformation shared often seems to spike sharply for reasons both sinister and foolish. Some folks want to actively share propaganda, and other people who spread the propaganda around because it sounds awfully good and awfully true and so surely it’s not propaganda at all (spoiler warning: it is). The most sinister of propaganda is the stuff that doesn’t read like propaganda at all. It sounds sensible. It comes from smart-sounding folks. Maybe it even comes from a primary major media source. Or! Maybe it comes from a friend. And we trust friends. Above all others. The circle of trust amongst people can be tighter and stronger than any other bond, and we like to think it keeps out bad ideas but sometimes it does the opposite — it traps the bad stuff within where we all huff it like glue.

This is easily solved, at least on the Internet.

It’s called “just fucking Google it.”

You know the paranoid phrase IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING?

Add a new one to your panoply of phrases:

BEFORE YOU FUCKING SHARE IT, JUST FUCKING GOOGLE IT.

Because usually, the order of operations goes like this:

a) see a thing

b) maybe read it all the way through or maybe just enjoy the insightful headline

c) SHARE IT LIKE SYPHILIS

Here, I would add a mere extra step:

a) see a thing

b) maybe read it all the way through or maybe just enjoy the insightful headline

c) FUCKING GOOGLE IT

d) determine whether or not you should share this thing or not

The impetus behind me asking for a slight shift in your Internet information-sharing habits is this: on Facebook, that most fertile breeding ground of dum-dummery, someone I was “friends” (air quotes are key) with shared a post from some ministry that was also so “patriotic” I’m pretty sure the writer ejaculates every time he sees an American flag. This post was all about how HEY GUESS WHAT JAPAN NEVER HAD ANY MUSLIM TERROR ATTACKS BECAUSE JAPAN KEEPS THEM MUSLIMS OUT, and then it goes on — sounding very factual and intellectual and actually not at all like my frothy caps-lock tone suggests! — to lay out its case with facts and details. Japan doesn’t allow Muslims into the country, Japan doesn’t allow the study of Islam, and only a “few hundred” Muslims even live in the country. I mean wow. Who knew?

So very simple and straightforward, right? Japan is safe because Japan closed its doors to Islam.

Full stop. End of story. Huzzah and hooray.

Now, let’s for a moment try to see past the sheer irony of someone like this using Japan as an example — I say ironic because I’m guessing that this dipshit would normally froth at the mouth if he even heard the words “Pearl” and “Harbor” in the same sentence. Further, let’s also look past the fact that even if it were all true, that doesn’t make it right, and it doesn’t make it simple…

It’s all bullshit.

Which is easily discovered through the strategy of –

Wait for it.

Waaaaaaait for it.

JUST FUCKING GOOGLE IT.

All you gotta do is take like, less than two minutes of your life and Google it. Hell, Google already had this one locked and loaded in the chamber, as it auto-filled the search term for me. It’s not only bullshit, it’s old bullshit — years-old from one of those chain letter e-mails you probably got from your racist grandpa. And it takes a shallow dive to see the author of the piece is a one of two authors who co-wrote this lunatic e-book about immigration (spoiler warning: its cover offers a big red clumsy font and an image of the burning World Trade towers) and whose entire presence on the Internet is a racist sham. (I’m not linking to any of this because, really, ugh.) And of course statistically, the 1.6 billion Muslims globally could not possibly be related to the fractional number of terrorists in the world, so tying one to the other is super-dubious and…

Point is, it took me no time at all in my day to suss this out. It took as much effort as it takes to clean a filthy window so that you can see through it more clearly.

It’s not your fault. Our brains are poorly wired. You know how like, Dell computers come pre-loaded with lots of junk-ware? Our brains come loaded with a lot of the same crummy software. Fallacies and fritzing logic centers and synaptic tangles that let us trust anecdotal information over statistical reality. Surely once upon a time this bloatware probably helped us defend ourselves from baboon attacks or something, but those days are gone, and now as we sit plump and happy anxious in our office chairs, we have to defeat our fucky reptilian brains and cleave to some kind of logic. Particularly when sharing information — because information creates for us a story, and story is important. Narrative matters. That’s why propaganda exists.

Here someone will probably say, WELL IT HAPPENS ON BOTH SIDES, and sure, yeah, yes, it does. And I’ve done the thing too where you share something and then learn fairly quickly that it’s old, outdated, or just plain wrong-o. Thing is, the power of JUST FUCKING GOOGLE IT is that it will limit the bullshit on all sides of a thing. It’s not perfect, no. It will not grant you 20/20 vision — certainly you have to possess reason and common sense, and further, Google is capable of floating bullshit to the top of the pond, too. And sometimes it’s not as easy as taking just a minute or two of your time. Sometimes it takes some actual reading! (gasp.) Just the same, in my experience it’s still a very good start. God knows, you might even learn something in the process.

So, repeat after me:

BEFORE YOU FUCKING SHARE IT, JUST FUCKING GOOGLE IT.

Truth will out. And, hopefully, Google will out, too.

(Small call to action, here: if you are capable of donating to charity, please consider doing so. Charity Navigator will rate charities for you and show you vital statistics of each charity, and so you might want to look at Doctors Without Borders, or the American Refugee Committee.)

NaNoWriMo Midpoint — How Goes It?

We are just over the midpoint hump in NaNoWriMo — so it’s time to check in, see how you’re doing. I’ll have a post later about dealing with the midpoint of your book, but in the meantime, how has it been for you? How is the book? How and what is your process? If this is your first time doing NaNoWriMo, how do you find it?

I’m unofficially participating, as I do with many months — I’m presently just over 41,000 words, though that’ll slow down because I travel this week and because next week is the TURKEY PARADE that is Thanksgiving. I am dubious that my 41,000 words are worth a single good goddamn, but that’s the burden most writers bear regarding their own work. Show me an author who is uniformly pleased with everything she writes all the time and I will show you an ANDROID WHO MUST BE UNMASKED BEFORE IT MURDERS ALL OF HUMANITY.

So, status updates — let’s hear them.

Flash Fiction Challenge: Random Song Title Palooza

Man, I didn’t do a flash fiction challenge last week, did I?

I AM DOPEY MCGEE.

Anyway, this week, let’s make it easy. Go to your favorite music playing app or device, spin up a random song either of your own or from a service like Pandora.

The title of the song is now also the title of your story.

And you should listen to the song and take from it inspiration to tell the tale.

You’ve got 1000 words.

Post at your online space.

Link back here in the comments so we can all read it.

Due by next week — Friday the 20th, noon EST.

Thimbles Full Of News Slurry

Some quick newsy bits of note:

First up, readers have written-in Star Wars: Aftermath to the Goodreads Choice Awards under the Best Sci-Fi Books of 2015 category, so thank you! That category and all the others have an overwhelmingly awesome array of books, so, y’know, go vote for some. And if you do end up voting for Aftermath, hey, thank you a whole buncha bunches.

Next: Zer0es is one of Amazon’s best books of 2015 in the sci-fi and fantasy category, putting me in truly enviable company. Thanks to Amazon, and hope you guys check the book out. (Oh, and an audio version is in the works!)

And reminder! Tomorrow night! 6:30PM, me and Adam Christopher will be at the Doylestown Bookshop. He’ll be talking Made to Kill. I’ll be talking Star Wars and Zer0es. We’ll both be talking The Shield. It’ll be awesome. BE THERE, PA/NJ/DE HUMANS.

Next Thursday is my Charlotte appearance, too.

And, uhh. THAT’S IT, I GUESS.

*flings down smoke bomb*

*coughs because of smoke*

*why do I keep buying these*

*stupid smoke*

American Presidential Politics: A Helpful Primer!

SOME HORSES JUST WANT TO WATCH THE WORLD BURN

We’re now one year out from the election, and this particular election cycle has been going on for — *checks watch* — well, let’s just go with FOR AN INTOLERABLE AMOUNT OF TIME. And last night was the 3,912th iteration of the GOP debates, our current favorite sport, where yet again the candidates disappointingly failed to oust one another with sword and javelin.

I have occasionally seen some international friends marvel at our election process, particularly as regards the EAGLE THRONE OF LORD PRESIDENT, and I imagine they have a look on their faces like, “Wow, what the unholy hell is going on over there in America? Is everybody okay? Do they need an intervention?” Meanwhile, Canada elected Justin Trudeau, a certified hunk of smoldering manflesh who then filled his cabinet with people who are both actually capable to do their jobs but also represent surprising ethnic and gender diversity. (When asked why he did this, Trudeau said, and I’m paraphrasing, “Because it’s 2015 and because you have to ask me that question, you jabbering chimpanzee. Now behold my sexiness as I snowboard into your heart. WWHIISSH.”)

So, to those wondering what’s going on over here, I will take a moment to explain.

Presidential politics is composed of two stages:

The primary race.

And then the presidential race.

The primary race is the thousand-year stage where we’re at now, in which each party votes for its particular KINGSLAYER who will attempt to forcibly occupy the EAGLE THRONE during the next round of Presidential Idol, the race itself. This first half represents an ugly, inefficient and ultimately demeaning contest, and here’s what I mean:

To win your primary, you must “appease your base.” See, your base comprises the center mass of your political party tribe — and this can be viewed best as a naked, filthy throng of zealots and acolytes pawing and biting at one another. You have to make those people happy, or so the wisdom goes. In effect, your job as a candidate is to cover yourself in as much pigshit as possible in order to convince the filthy throng that you are just like them. You just keep glopping it on, the wet slaps of hog ordure echoing through the auditorium as you dance and gambol about, ooking and gabbling and urinating everywhere. I’M JUST LIKE YOU, you must grunt and gibber.

I AM JUST LIKE YOU.

Ah, but then you win the nomination.

Then you go to the big race, where you no longer are trying to appease the lunatic mass of your tribe. Now you’re trying to appeal to the larger voting body — more or less everyone. You really can’t win that election by impressing only your party. You gotta shoot down the middle. So, in the first race, you shellac yourself in swine feces. And in the second race, you now have to convince the rest of us that no sir, I never covered myself in pigshit, not once, not ever, never will, nope, nope, nope. What’s that smell? It’s not me. It’s the other guy. What’s that? You have video of me pouring buckets of farm filth over my head? That’s not me. That’s somebody else. I’m your guy.

In the primary race, you have to aim for the fringes.

And in the presidential race, you have to aim for the center.

This might sound like you ultimately appealing to everyone by the end — the farthest-flung and the most moderate — but that’s not really how it works. Because moderates and fringe people don’t really see eye to eye. This isn’t scoring points. This is allying with opposing groups and then trying to pretend you never did that. This is clan politics. This is tribal warfare. (And really, it’s a result of the very limited two-party system — but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Now, ultimately, this is true for both parties. But here’s where I attempt to shut down false equivalency (aka the excuse of BOTH PARTIES ARE JUST AS BAD) and where I further show my admittedly liberal (if not explicitly Democratic) bias –

The GOP covers itself in a far stinkier brand of pigshit.

Like, the Democrats? Their pigshit smells mostly pretty nice. You may not like it. You may not think it’s effective enough, or the right smell, or that it’s too nice, but at the end of the day, the liberals usually come out of the gate trying to convince their base of their basic humanity — right? They want health care and less war and fewer guns to kill ourselves with — their pigshit is, for better or for worse, optimistic. Maybe that optimism is ideal. Maybe it’s naive. Maybe it’s a lie. (That’s for you to decide.) At the end of the day, the Democratic party is more moderate, and so their political base lines up more cleanly (if imperfectly) with the moderate outlook.

The GOP though, they get worse every cycle. Their shit stinks louder every time. It’s as if Rush Limbaugh impregnated the party years back with his demon seed, and that baby’s been swelling and bloating inside the beast ever since. The GOP is increasingly reducing their pigshit down like a fine French sauce until its potency is truly eye-watering. It’s no longer enough to say blah blah blah you want smaller government and fiscal responsibility. Now you have to want no government at all. Now you have to somehow pull off the spine-bowing gymnastics where you convince your party that you’re running for governmental office yet are mysteriously anti-government. Worse, you have to claim to want no government while at the same time claiming to want more government intervention in things like, say, women’s uteruses. You’ve gotta be a total shithead, actually — you have to say you hate women and brown people and Muslims and science? What’s science? Isn’t science the thing that makes Jesus sad? Yeah, no, fuck science, science has never gotten us anywhere ever. Remember the Dark Ages? THOSE WERE THE BEST OF TIMES. Jesus will tell you. He loved the Dark Ages. In fact, you have to commit to the positively Satanic act of convincing people you’re a total JESUSHEAD while simultaneously taking political positions that would’ve made the Real Jesus turn into an actual white person because of how pale he’d go — if Jesus were here right now, we probably would’ve convinced him that we simply do not deserve to live. All that love thy neighbor bullshit would fall by the wayside as he reluctantly commanded the Second Deluge to sweep us all away. Maybe he’d call that Second Deluge “global warming,” and then he’d laugh as we all drowned in the boiling water that the GOP said was never coming because, if you’ll recall, science is stupid and climate change is a lie.

And JESUS FORBID you’re actually reasonable. The more reasonable you are, the deeper your poll numbers plunge. Jon Huntsman came out of the gate and was like, “Global warming is real and the GOP should’ve been leading the way on gay marriage because that’s the epitome of the government staying out of your business,” and I’m pretty sure a broken toaster would’ve gotten better poll numbers. Meanwhile, Ben Carson wants to convince you he tried to stab a kid and that Jesus filled the Pyramids with Secret Jesus Frankenstein Monsters, and Trump wants you to know that fuck you, that’s what, and those two kookaloons are soaring in the poll numbers.

All the while, you hear the moist sounds of pigshit hitting skin.

SLAP. SPLAP. SPLURCH. PBBBT.

And the tribe moans and applauds and moves together with the gallumphing sameness of a slime mold whose glistening pseudopods writhe in squishy unison.

Then they win the nomination, quick wash off, and try to convince you they don’t think all the horrible things they think — or at least that they never said the horrible things they said.

(As a sidenote, this is one of the reasons I’m dubious of Bernie Sanders’ ability to win the nomination. Setting aside the fact he’s old and yells at you like your grandpa, his politics — while smart and lovely! — are also probably outside the scope of the moderate middle American vibe. I may be cynical here and I do like him. But I worry. I worry.)

How do you fix it? Fuck, I dunno. I dunno if there is a fix. The 24-hour-news-cycle makes it worse. The 25-hour-tornado-ragey-snark-fest that is the Internet exacerbates it. The laws allowing money in politics ensures that corporate interests trump human interests. The two-party system — well, I already went there. Lots of people vote for the presidential contest, but too few vote for any of the local or state ones. Maybe it’s fixable. I dunno.

But my fear is that it keeps on swirling the drain like this. That the stench of pigshit gets stenchier. That politics continues to be a hold-your-nose affair.

Then again, Canada just elected Trudeau, so what do I know? Maybe a better day truly awaits.

Maybe we should just listen to The Oatmeal reminding us, “It’s going to be okay.”

ANYWAY. So, that’s the primary process, explained through ANIMAL WASTE.

More on the big contest later, when our party’s KINGSLAYERS have been decided!

Wooooo!

*cry-vomits into open hands*

Parenthood Is An Act Of Hostage Negotiation With A Broken Robot

This is literally some shit that just happened:

As is my routine, I left the shed to go inside to make The 4-Year-Old Presently Known As B-Dub breakfast. He came downstairs, excited to begin his day. He informed me that he was SHOCKWAVE, and I was Shockwave’s best friend, SHOCKDAVE (he quickly changed his mind and determined that he was instead Soundwave, because duh).

Everyone was happy. He had awakened as usual, demonstrating the energy of a meth-addled rock drummer, and mornings are usually pretty good because he hasn’t built up all the barnacles one might accumulate during one’s daily existence.

He said he wanted to find these pipes he’d been playing with — they’re not PVC pipes, they’re narrower than that, but he uses them as lightsabers and musical instruments and whatever. (As with many things, the best toys are rarely ones you buy, but rather: random-ass trash. Note I didn’t say random ass-trash, because ew. Hyphen placement matters, kids.)

Great! Fine. But –

He could not find them and immediately began to get upset.

Most times, things like this don’t bother him, but now, it did. You could see the storm about to break on his shores. The wet eyes. The hands balling into fists at his side. His eyes shooting lasers. Okay, maybe not that last bit. But almost.

I commit to helping him look. I immediately find them — ten seconds later, I discover them on the couch under a blanket. I think, HA HA, DADDY IS A HERO. Daddy staved off the stampeding army of a coming tantrum. Daddy is basically like, the Hercules of the parent set right now. Now let’s all go into the kitchen and eat some fucking pancakes because the day is saved.

Daddy was jolly well fucking wrong is what he was.

B-Dub loses his gourd. If he could’ve flipped a table, he would’ve flipped a table. His reason for the escalation of the meltdown is this, and I quote: THOSE AREN’T THEM. As in, the things I found are not the things he was looking for, except I know they are. They are! I’m sure of it! He’s wrong! Is he just fucking with me? Have I lost my mind? And then he adds, for melodramatic flourish: I HAVE NEVER SEEN THOSE THINGS BEFORE IN MY LIFE. (Another lie!) He demands I cover them back up with the blanket — I guess the sight of them alone might make him rage-barf — and then proceeds to stomp around the room like he’s trying to kill a swarm of ants or something.

My wife comes downstairs and she tries to ameliorate the situation and that just — yeah, no. That’s just a burr stuck between his buttcheeks.

My wife is excellent because she’s basically a hostage negotiator. She knows how to speak calmly yet still manipulate him into an end game while making him think he is getting exactly what he wants — she reiterates the situation and the problem and coaches him into an emotional solution. I have this power sometimes, other times I just stare at him like he’s a malfunctioning vacuum. (When hostage negotiation fails, the best bet is to leave him alone and let the preschooler tornado burn himself out — eventually he can’t sustain his own inane rage and it sputters.)

Either way, she got him calm. He came in, said sorry, gave hugs, ate pancakes, yay, whatever.

Here, you think: kids are just… they’re just fucked, man. They can’t keep it together for fundamental, mundane stuff. They’re like Windows computers from the 1990s — they just aren’t built right. They malfunction. They fritz out. UNEXPECTED BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH even when you’re trying to do something basic like update your calendar or write an email. Kids are like broken robots. THIS ROBOT DOES NOT UNDERSTAND ASIMOV’S LAWS. It just whirrs around the house eating your plants and peeing on the heating vents. All while yelling at you.

Thing is, the door swings the other way, too.

Sometimes they’re alarmingly broken little creatures.

Other times, they can be incredibly well-put-together. They can demonstrate levels of awareness and maturity that most adults are never able to muster. Case in point:

Last week, B-Dub wanted to buy a new Minecraft texture pack. To which I said no because (and here my father’s voice gurgles up out of me like a ghost yelling through a sewer grate) WE’RE NOT MADE OF MONEY. Which ticked him off, and the coming tantrum from a situation like that is a little more predictable. I said no to a thing he wanted — it’s like denying a komodo dragon food. It will hiss and spit and bite because it wants the food. Its reptilian urges will not be denied.

Except, they were denied, and he got mad.

Fine.

Minutes later, he comes into the kitchen, calm as a summer breeze. He says that he’s okay now. He had taken a deep breath (which is a calming technique we taught him) and said that he was letting the texture pack go because it was “too much” in his head and he was going to “lose the idea” because he didn’t really need the pack. He explained to me and my wife that he really wanted it, but knew he didn’t really need it — he conceded he just wanted something. And he added, “I’m okay, now,” then walked the fuck away like a Zen master who had just given up the need for material goods, the world exploding behind him in a fiery plume.

And I was like, dang, kid. I certainly cannot manage that kind of confidence and security. When I want something, it’s like the desire for it lives in my salivary glands — and it’s worse if someone tells me I can’t have it. I don’t care if it’s a cookie or a chainsaw. When I want it, I want it, and damnit why can’t I have it? I WILL SLAPFIGHT YOU OVER A CUPCAKE IF YOU DENY ME. So, here’s this four-year-old illustrating a kind of calm, collected bad-assness that was really quite amazing.

See, sometimes they’re broken robots.

But sometimes they are Bodhisattvas sent here to shepherd us toward better habits.

I don’t have any great takeaway here, really.

Kids are weird, is what I’m saying. And we have the tendency, I think, to respond to children like either they should already be adults or instead respond to them like they’ll never be capable of becoming adults. I know I’m guilty of both — sometimes I want to do the thing my Dad did which was get firm and angry and be like, THE REAL WORLD WON’T ACCEPT THESE SHENANIGANS SO WHY SHOULD I, even though the reality is, he’s not ready for that kind of logic. He’s this kinetic bundle of emotions, and all his synapses haven’t learned to fire together yet. His logic centers are sometimes dominated by his emotional ones — and sometimes his emotional ones are like the wires of the Millennium Falcon, pulled out of the ceiling and draped in a tangle over Chewbacca’s shoulders. But at the same time, you don’t want to treat him like he’s just some wackadoo dum-dum who can’t handle the things that life throws at him, because all too often he shows full well how stalwart he is in the face of problems that would sucker-punch most adults.

I think the best thing we can do is trust them and to have empathy for them. They’re going to get it wrong a whole lot, and we have to accept that. But they’re going to get it right, too — and while we don’t have to expect that, I think we have to allow room for it to happen. We have to help them learn to be people. That’s still so weird to me. They’re not really fully-formed human beings, not yet. We have to teach the broken robot to become a real boy — and, eventually a real grown-up. A grown-up hopefully better than the ones we ourselves became.

NOW WHO WANTS TO SLAPFIGHT ME OVER THIS CUPCAKE.

Ha ha just kidding I already ate it.