Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 124

Max Gladstone: Dance, Monkey, Dance! (or: Giving Players What They Want Without Destroying Yourself)

Max Gladstone is basically the smartest guy in any room. He may in fact not be human at all, but a benevolent alien to make us all better people. Just last week he riffed off of the new Star Wars trailer in a post tackling the myth of the Jedi –“Galactic History, or Galactic Folk Tale?” And this week here he is to talk about game design and, in particular, Deathless: The City’s Thirst.

* * *

“Play your old stuff!”

My friend Chris once called those the most vicious words in rock & roll. An artist stands pinned by spotlight, trying something new, and the audience cries back: no, thanks, do what you did last time!

Cue blood sacrifice of goats in hotel rooms, instruments smashed on stage, various substances injected into various veins, et cetera.

The worst part is, both audience and artist are right. The audience wants something they recognize; they want to connect with the selves they were in middle school when they first heard (insert That Song From Middle School here—you know, the piece that made you sit up and think, “They really get me!” Might be “One Headlight,” or “Sing,” or the Brandenburg Concerto). The audience wants to reclaim that first taste of forever. And there’s nothing wrong with that! The artist scorns the audience’s desire at her peril.

But the artist knows, too: nostalgia only goes so far. And while the audience is hungry to recover that moment the walls fell down, they also want the walls to fall down again—they want to feel the way they felt when they first heard that bass line—when those words crawled across the screen—when they warped into Myst.

The problem is, no one knows how to ask for that, because anything we know to ask for isn’t new, by definition.

So, where does that leave us?

And how does all this relate to skeleton lawyers, undead gods, and giant scorpions?

Good question.

Two years ago, I released Choice of the Deathless, an interactive necromantic legal thriller set in the world of my Craft Sequence books. Players take the role of a junior associate at a demonic law firm—that is to say, it’s a firm specializing in demonic transactions, not a law firm of demons, though there’s overlap—and try to pay off their student loans, make partner, find love, and survive to payday. I had a great time working on the game, it sold well, got nominated for a couple awards, and the publisher came back: we’d love a sequel!

You see my problem.

I couldn’t write the same game again. People who want to replay the last game can always do so—since the game’s text-based, it’s not even as if technology’s progressed in the meantime. The imagination’s as high-res as ever. A proper sequel also wouldn’t work. Players can end the first game dead or alive, working for the firm or not, in love or out, having made drastically different impacts on the game world. Crushing all those options down to a sequel hook seemed one step away from saying the player’s choices in the first game didn’t matter.

So I wanted a game that worked like the first one, but differently. Which meant asking, what was the first game doing, anyway?

This is an uncomfortable question. My first instinct is always to answer with a joke—to disarm, or failing that to run away.

“What is this game doing?” “Look! The Badyear blimp!”

“Why did you write $Most_Recent_Project?” *punches interlocutor in face* *adopts fake Russian accent* “VE ASK ZE QVESTIONS HERE, KOMRAD.”

“Really, I just want to—“ *Dons James Bond jetpack* *Rockets through skylight* “I’m sho sorry, but it sheems I have to jet.”

But since I was the one asking, I had to come up with an answer eventually.

Choice of the Deathless wrapped its setting around a question. The modern fantasy world I built, with skyscrapers and student loans and demons and necromancy, is complicated and morally ambiguous. In that kind of a situation, do you help others, or put yourself first? How much does power matter to you? Is the power you get by collaborating with monsters really power at all?

Writing these questions out, I realized they were internally focused. I kept asking the player: who are you? (Or: who’s your character?) How would you respond?

So, to explore the same setting from a different angle, I could flip the question. The first game was inwardly directed, so the second should revolve around the character’s goals and methods. Rather than “who are you,” I’d ask: “what are you doing?” How will change the world? What problems will you fix? What methods will you use? What’s worth the price you’ll pay?

And with that, I had the core of Deathless: The City’s Thirst — a world of dead gods and the wizards who killed them. The player controls a survivor of the God Wars, working for a necromantic water utility, trying to get enough water for a desert city that’s successfully rebelled against its bloodthirsty rain god. What will you do to save your city? What compromises will you make?

Whose side are you on?

From that seed, and months of crunch time, I grew a game. It’s out this week—we’ll see what people think!

There are other ways to do the same thing differently. You can keep the theme and change the trappings; you can keep theme and trappings but change structure to subvert or bolster either. Flip. Spin. Tell the story from the inside out. Change the angle. Add plot, or subtract it. Ask an old character new questions. (I love how Lois McMaster Bujold does this; every few books she throws Miles Vorkosigan an enormous curveball. Poor guy barely figures out the answer to one question before another smacks him in the face.)

But even so, at the end of the day some folk will just want to hear your old stuff.

You know what? That’s okay. You wouldn’t have played your old stuff if it wasn’t worth playing.

But this game, this story, will connect with some people in a way the last one didn’t. And when you next sit down to write, the new stuff will be old stuff—and people will want to hear that again, too.

On the one hand: great. You’ve grown your thematic range. You’re doing more work, better.

On the other hand… No pressure.

An Informal Poll On NaNoWriMo

IT IS ALMOST TIME.

The time when we open the gates and human and novel run through the city streets, goring the unsuspecting while crushing the cobblestone beneath their stampeding hooves and feet –

Or, uh, something like that.

It’s NaNoWriMo — or one week from it.

National Novel Writing Month, for the uninitiated.

So, my question is:

Who has done it before?

How’d it go? What are your thoughts about it?

And then:

Who’s doing it this year? What are you planning to write?

ANSWER IF YOU DARE.

*thunder of hooves*

The Blue Blazes and The Hellsblood Bride Are Now Available

The saying goes that there is more below the streets of New York City

than there is above them. An exaggeration by those who say it, perhaps,

but they don’t know just how accurate that statement truly is.

Hell’s heart, as it turns out, has many chambers.

—

From the Journals of John Atticus Oakes,

Cartographer of the Great Below

Mookie Pearl is back.

He’s the one-man army separating the criminal underworld from the very real, very monstrous underworld existing beneath the streets of Manhattan. In the first book, his daughter Nora rises against him to carve out her own little piece of territory shared across both underworlds. And in book two, Nora is trapped in Hell and needs Mookie’s help to escape — unless she can cut her own deal with Mookie’s enemies to allow her egress.

Features: gobbos, half-n-halfs, snakefaces, god-worms, occult drugs, sandhogs, reaper-cloaks, the skinless, mobsters, ghosts, zombies, punching, explosions, charcuterie, family drama.

You have a couple ways to get these two books.

First is, well, free.

I’m offering up the books in PDF format for free.

No, really. You can get them here:

Blue Blazes PDF, Free.

Hellsblood Bride PDF, Also Free.

Enjoy. My gift to you.

Listen, to speak frankly — these books are what they are, warts and all. I’m happy with them, and I love Mookie as a character, and I’m pleased to just offer them up just so people can read them.

If you want ‘em in an alternate format, or you’d like to actually toss some coin my way… go below, and you’ll find what you need. You can buy them direct from me via Payhip, or you can snag ‘em from Amazon. I may get them up over at B&N and iBooks and the like, but really, my sales there have been so marginal I’m hesitant to even put in the effort.

The Blue Blazes
…

(Buying direct from Payhip gets you MOBI, ePub, PDF, Html: direct link.)

Or, check out from Amazon.

The Hellsblood Bride
…

(Buying direct from Payhip gets you MOBI, ePub, PDF, Html: direct link.)

Or, check out from Amazon.

Will There Be A Third Book?

The third book would be titled A Sky Born Black, if it were ever to exist, I think. Or maybe The Skyborn Bane. (Other titles might come up.) But all that presumes a third book is even in the offing — at this point, without a publisher? I dunno. Maybe. If the book does well published on my own, I’d definitely do one up — but at present, it remains to be seen. (Note, however, the two books are complete — a third book is not a necessity to conclude the series. The second book has a very concrete ending — an ending that a third book would exploit and explore.)

Hyperion!

Hey, some holy crap news.

So, like, I’m maybe kinda sorta writing a comic for Marvel.

Hyperion. Coming soon. Art in the book the astonishing Nik Virella. That sexy bad-asscover art above is by Emanuela Lupacchino.

The announcement is here at CBR, along with some other new Marvel titles (holy crap Becky Cloonan on Punisher is a coup and a delight).

And you can check out an interview with me at Newsarama to learn more about the book.

Needless to say, I am geeked to the max (that’s right, I’m bringing “to the max” back into the parlance, folks) to be a part of this — Marvel is doing some really amazing stuff right now and it’s a pleasure to be allowed to play in their sandbox. I’m excited by the collaboration here and — well, more soon! *flies away, cape fluttering, gets sucked into jet engine, dies*

Kevin Hearne: The Book Tour FAQ

Kevin Hearne is doing a rad tour for his newest, Staked. And as such, he hears a lot of the questions writers get when it comes time to tour in support of any new book, and so it seemed like a good idea to cross-post his FAQ here (with his permission). Behold: the Tacopope’s Decree! 

By the way, go pre-order Staked now: Indiebound, Amazon, B&N.

Q: Why don’t you come to my town? We have tacos and beer.

An excellent, fair, and frequently asked question that I often don’t have the time or ability to answer in social media! Going to take the time now and refer to this post as needed, because there’s a lot to it and this is a question many authors get asked.

First: It is not because I don’t love you or tacos or beer. People come at me sometimes with “Why don’t you love the place I live?” as if that’s my only criteria for choosing tour stops. The very short answer—the answer to so many things, alas—is math.  Mostly the fact that I can only visit ten or fewer places and there are many more places than that out there. Math says I’m most likely not going to visit your town, or even your state. But it’s never because I don’t want to, so please don’t be upset with me. Be upset with math. I’m gonna explain further below because I get the feeling most folks don’t understand how the tour ecology works. (I didn’t understand until I started doing tours so don’t feel bad, this is not common knowledge!)

Stuff authors & publicists look at when arranging tours (not a comprehensive list but these are the biggies):

1. Population density. The cold, hard fact of the business is that a hell of a lot of people on the earth do not read for pleasure. And the ones that do in any given city might not read urban fantasy or whatever an author’s genre happens to be. So we have to go where the largest pools of potential readers are living and hope there are enough of ours there who first actually hear about us coming and second care enough to come see us. All of which usually means authors visit the really big cities and their sprawling metropolitan areas.

a. Getting the word out about appearances is surprisingly difficult. I can’t tell you how often I go somewhere with full social media and website blitz and even publisher help, then announce the next day I will be in town X, and someone from the city I was just in says “Come to my city!” And I’m like aww…dude. I did everything I could to publicize my appearance in your city and yet the appearance you heard about was some other one…? It’s baffling and frustrating for both authors and readers, believe me. Which leads me to the next bit and the importance of community outreach.

2. A thriving independent bookstore that welcomes events. This is, quite frankly, a majorconsideration. Hold on, lots of points and examples ahead.

a. For stores like The Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale and Powell’s in Portland (and many others!) holding events is a vital part of their business plan. It brings readers into their store that might not otherwise stroll in. It helps them keep the lights on. It makes their store a center of culture in their city.

b. The Poisoned Pen (and others on the ball) have a customer email/postcard list to which people voluntarily subscribe. I subscribe to theirs and every month I get a list of the author events scheduled at the store. They hold 250+ events a year! And when I know about those events I try to get there so I can satisfy my inner fanboy. Which means The Poisoned Pen is very good for authors and readers, and almost every major mystery book that gets released in the US also means an author appearance at their store. But they do other genre stuff too: Diana Gabaldon works with them. So do I. Jim Butcher stops there, and so do other genre authors. And the publicists in New York know that The Poisoned Pen does a great job with events so they schedule tours to go through Phoenix/Scottsdale. The other big indie that’s great at events in the Phoenix area is Changing Hands (and they also have an email list). Which means that if you’re an author ready to do a big tour, Phoenix will probably be a stop because 1) It’s the sixth largest metro area in the US, so it’s got the population density thing nailed, and 2) there are two excellent indie stores there that regularly hold events and have a great relationship with the reading community. But stores like that just can’t be found everywhere. If you would like one to be near you, then it is in fact up to you.

c. Visit your indie store instead of ordering online. Keep your local business in business! Subscribe to their email list so that you know who’s coming and when. Attend their events. Start a book club at the store or join one! Bring your friends and have them subscribe to the list too. Community outreach is just huge because as I mentioned above, authors’ and publishers’ attempts to publicize an appearance often don’t reach readers who’d like to know about it. And when authors have events at your store and do well, then word will filter through to other authors and their publicists. I’m going to be visiting an indie store that’s in a midsize city for the Staked tour—Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, NC—because I keep hearing what a great store it is and how dialed in it is to the reading community. Plus it’s well located regionally so people from several other cities can get there if they wanna. Charlotte, Knoxville, Spartanburg or Greenville SC—all within reasonable distance. Good indie store + access to large population = author visits. Math.

d. Cities that let their indie stores close? Well, it’s not the end forever, but it definitely puts a damper on authors showing up. Two examples to illustrate the principle: 1) Dallas/Ft Worth. You had an AMAZING store called A Real Bookstore that served BEER inside. I did a thing there once with Jaye Wells and it was simply awesome. I loved it! Wanted to go back forever! But by the time my next book came out, it had closed! I wept. So there was no Dallas tour stop for that book, and I doubt I’ll be back unless a new indie store sprouts up (they really are that important in deciding where to go). I am visiting Austin and Houston instead on the Staked tour because they have Book People and Murder By the Book, respectively, which both hold lots of events and bring in lots of readers. Seriously, Austin and Houston: You have two of the best indie bookstores in the US there.  Give ’em lots of love and don’t let ’em die. 2) Nashville is an example of how communities can turn it around. They had all their indie stores die out for a while, and then author Ann Patchett couldn’t stand the tragedy of it and opened Parnassus Books. People love it there. Nashville got its second chance and embraced it, so Nashville gets plenty of author visits now. I was there for the Tricked tour. It’s an object lesson how you can make your city a place that authors visit. Ann didn’t do it by herself. The people of Nashville did it! Readers supported Parnassus instead of online giants. Then they demanded to see authors and authors supplied that demand.

(Entrance to the Powell’s Books store at Cedar Hills Crossing (Beaverton, OR) from inside the mall. Photo by Steve Morgan.)

3. Some cities—in part because of the great indie stores, I think—have thriving reader cultures, and I often wonder if we appreciate just how important such stores are to the community. I’m going to single out Portland here as an example. Powell’s City of Books downtown is a simply stunning place to visit. But their stores in Beaverton and elsewhere are truly great also. Thanks to Powell’s, the Portland metro area enjoys regular visits from the world’s authors, fiction and nonfiction, giving residents of that city access to creative and inspirational minds almost every single day. And that’s why I think their city is such a trip, constantly innovating and re-inventing itself. It’s because there’s a freaking awesome bookstore there and people read voraciously and treasure ideas and creativity. They show up for authors so authors keep showing up in Portland.

f. I have had three very kind & vocal people repeatedly ask me to come to Las Vegas. It’s turbo sweet but here’s the thing: Las Vegas actively—even aggressively—promotes itself as the place to do anything but read. That doesn’t mean nobody reads there—obviously many do, and I appreciate hearing from the three people who would really like me to visit! However, I am simply unaware of an indie store in the area. I know I could search for one online—that’s not the point. The point is that as an author who speaks with other authors regularly and discusses tours and great bookstores in the United States, I’ve never heard of anyone having an event in Las Vegas. Ever. At least not so far. Maybe even author events that happen in Vegas stay in Vegas? I don’t know. But that leads me (perhaps erroneously, I admit!) to conclude that they don’t have an indie store there that regularly holds events.

g. Related to that last point, I’ve had many people from Kansas City and Pittsburgh show up on my FB or Twitter feeds and ask me to visit. Thank you! That matters! It helps! I love you! It has me thinking about visiting both places. But please speak up at your indie bookstores too. Or your libraries. They will, in turn, talk to my publicist in NY. Know why I started going to Houston and then kept going back? Murder By the Book contacted my publisher and asked for me. They said they wanted me there and I’d have a great event because they knew their readers. And holy shit, they were right! I had a hundred people show up with barbecue! I have such a good time every time I visit that I can’t leave Houston out of my tours now. But again, it’s not just the store doing it—Houston’s doing it! Murder By the Book got me there but the readers also showed up.  So if you’d like me (or any author!) to come to your town, definitely let the authors know but also be vocal and present at your indie store!

h. I’ve done a bit of looking into the Pittsburgh thing especially because I hear from readers there so often. And the indie store situation there is unclear. Right now I’m hearing through the grapevine there’s a new owner at Mystery Booksellers and maybe they’d be cool with events? (Mystery shops often host sf/f writers, like The Poisoned Pen and Murder by the Book do.) If that’s the case…well, I’d like to know if that’s the case. O Good and Brilliant Peeps of Pittsburgh (and everyone who doesn’t get to see the authors they want): This is a fixable thing. You’ve made it very clear to me through the provenance of social media that you have a lot of awesome, enthusiastic readers. But right now, at least from my admittedly non-local perspective, it appears that your city doesn’t have a clear go-to for author events.  Where’s the place to go? In Portland it’s Powell’s. In San Diego it’s Mysterious Galaxy. In Lexington, Kentucky, it’s Joseph-Beth Booksellers. In Nashville it’s Parnassus. In Denver it’s Tattered Cover. Where’s the iconic indie in Pittsburgh? I’m using you as an example but understand that there are many, many cities in the same boat. Authors would love to visit their readers everywhere but we really need a place to go where we’re fairly certain people will show up. Because of number 3.

3. Travel expenses. Tours are damn pricy and for the vast majority of authors not a money-maker. In fact this is why most authors do not tour at all or only do events near their hometowns. (And also why we rarely do international visits. The markets are smaller and it’s hugely expensive to travel out of the country, which makes the math tougher.) Let’s say I’m promoting a paperback like I did for my first six books. I get sixty-four cents per copy (that’s fairly standard these days). If I sell a hundred copies at an event (which is a lot!) I’ve made $64. Can I get airfare plus a hotel, rental car or taxi, and meals for under $64 anywhere? Hell no, not even close. There’s no way I can break even on a tour, forget about making a profit. And if you’re thinking the publisher is paying for my tour, well, yeah. They are now. But they didn’t when I first started out. I paid for everything myself for the first four books, and please understand that almost all authors do. Del Rey picked up a hotel room for book five’s tour and paid for a few more nights for book six but it was still mostly my dime. Only when I got to hardcover with book seven did I get a full publisher-sponsored tour, which I still can’t believe really happened.  Point is, aside from a very few gigantic names, authors don’t go on tours to make fat stacks of cash. We lose money on it but we do it because we have heard of sunlight and how we should get some and we also hope that those appearances will pay off down the road in word-of-mouth. So if we tour at all, we naturally try to arrange for events that don’t make us cry and feel like we’ve wasted our time and money. Because nothing blows chunks so much as traveling somewhere, spending cash you don’t really have on the trip, and then three people show up. (Yes, that’s happened to me. And it happens to lots of authors.) And something I genuinely fear more than my own embarrassment if nobody shows up: I don’t want the bookstores to feel like they’ve wasted their time and money either. (It does cost them time and money to set up an event!) So again, it goes back to big cities and stores with good reputations for community outreach and holding great events. We want to maximize the chances that everyone leaves happy.

4. I might have been to your city in the recent past or will be there soon. There are a few places I try to visit every tour now (Phoenix, Houston, Portland, and Denver) but otherwise I try to mix it up. Atlanta’s a pretty big city but I’m not stopping there this tour because I’ve been in Georgia twice already the past year. Chicago’s huge but I’ve been there a couple of times so I’m going to Michigan since I haven’t visited them at all yet. And I like visiting Seattle on tour but since I’m going to be at Emerald City Comic Con in April it seems silly to also stop there in February. Basically the Stakedtour is six cities I’ve visited before (Phoenix, Houston, Minneapolis, Portland, Ft. Collins, Denver) and five cities that are new to me (Austin, Orlando, Asheville, Crestview Hills KY, Lansing).

So I hope this helps explain why I (and authors in general) wind up going to some places and not others. I’d love to see all my readers. Math says I can’t. And in many cases there are cities I’d like to visit (like KC and Pittsburgh) but I haven’t yet heard through the author grapevine that there is a great place to do events in those towns. That can change! It takes work. It doesn’t happen overnight. But where you shop makes a difference in what’s available in your area. (The closing of many independent bookstores plus Borders and a slew of B&N stores is proof of that.) If you value cheap books or simply enjoy the ebook or audiobook format for any number of very good reasons, or if you live in a rural area with few bookstores, then yes, online is definitely the way to go. If you value meeting authors and asking them questions and such, supporting your local indie or library and asking them to book events is the answer.

Anyway: I love you all regardless of where you live or in what format you enjoy your books. I try to visit a few new places every tour, so I hope I’ll get to your town someday, or at least to a city somewhere nearish that you won’t mind making the trip to say hi. And if I can’t make it near where you are, remember — it’s never anything personal, it’s math!

Peace, tacos, & beer—

Kevin

Cassandra Khaw: Five Things I Learned Writing Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef (A Gods & Monsters Novella)

It’s not unusual to work two jobs in this day and age, but sorcerer and former triad soldier Rupert Wong’s life is more complicated than most. By day, he makes human hors d’oeuvres for a dynasty of ghouls; by night, he pushes pencils for the Ten Chinese Hells. Of course, it never seems to be enough to buy him a new car—or his restless, flesh-eating-ghost girlfriend passage from the reincarnation cycle—until opportunity comes smashing through his window.

In Kuala Lumpur, where deities from a handful of major faiths tip-toe around each other and damned souls number in the millions, it’s important to tread carefully. Now the Dragon King of the South wants to throw Rupert right in it. The ocean god’s daughter and her once-mortal husband have been murdered, leaving a single clue: bloodied feathers from the Greek furies. It’s a clue that could start a war between pantheons, and Rupert’s stuck in the middle. Success promises wealth, power and freedom, and failure… doesn’t.

1. You Don’t Always Have To Listen To People Who Know Better

I almost didn’t write this novella. When Abaddon Books opened their call for submissions, I had a number of people gently suggest that I shouldn’t bother. It sounds malevolent and destructive, I know, but it came from a good place. I’m a pathological workaholic. I spend at least 12 hours a day voluntarily toiling at something. I’ve always worked two jobs, or had too many deadlines stacked over each other — not because I needed the money, but because it was a compulsion. But that’s another story.

So, anyway, these people told me no, and I told myself yes. I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote. I polished it as much as I could and sent it to even more people, who then replied, “This isn’t very pulpy. Maybe, you should think about this again.”. Rupert Wong is like Rincewind smooshed together with Constantine. He doesn’t want to be heroic. He doesn’t want glory. He’d really, really rather be boring and stable and alive. Rupert’s world — the Gods & Monsters universe that Chuck built — is pulpy, but he’s a side character jammed into the spotlight.

But I liked Rupert. I liked the fact he was a bit player come to the forefront. I liked his neuroses. I liked the fact he was a great cook and a bit of a coward and a loving partner, who valued family more than anything else in the world. So, against everyone’s advice, I sent my entry in.

Welp.

2. You Should Listen To People Who Know Better

I haven’t really gotten a chance to say this on a public forum anyway, but I credit this debut to Stephen Power. He’s an editor in the publishing industry, a soon-to-be published author under the Simon451 banner, and a great person to talk to about how things work. Before I sent in my final manuscript to Abaddon, I ran over to him and went, “How’s this for a synopsis?”

He said nope.

By then, I’d already spent a week researching how to write synopses. I thought I had an idea about what was going on. But he hit me with critiques: this line was too opaque, that line tried to sell too much, this was pretty but it didn’t sell at all. I took his feedback and scurried back to the writing-web and thought things over. Some of his input, I kept. Others I put aside. But generally speaking? His remarks helped massively. Even if I didn’t follow his suggestions to the letter, I used to the spirit to them to rewrite that synopsis. (Thanks, Stephen. You are the best.)

3. Outlines Are Fucking Amazing (But You Should Know What You’re Doing)

Chuck said it first. Outlines rock. They also suck. They rock at sucking, and suck at rocking and somewhere in between that miasma of possibilities, they come together into something truly spectacular. I generally never, ever write outlines. Not for my nonfiction work, not for my short stories, and certainly not for longer pieces. (This is probably why I’ve never sold anything longer than a novella up till now.)

But Abaddon was very, very clear about wanting an outline. A 2,000-word outline. Specifically. So, reluctantly, I started piecing it together.

This was the first time I’d properly ever worked on a structure like this, ever thought it out with constraints. I’ve written them on-spec before, but no one seemed to mind very much if my outline sprawled into a novelette of its own. 2,000 words. Wow. That was something else. It compelled me to start reading up on narrative structures, which I’d only been vaguely aware of before. Lester Dent’s Pulp Master Fiction Plot eventually formed the bones of what I was pursuing. But I didn’t stop there. I hammered in the eight-point plot, reread all of my favorite old myths to see how they’re composed, then read even more things about plots. By the end of it, I’d gotten my outline to a science. It was beautiful. (In my eyes.)

And the funny thing about that is, despite the fact I’d made very specific decisions as to what I wanted to do with the outline, I changed about half of it by the time I started writing. Outlines only seem rigid, but I think they’re more sanity checks than anything else. You can still go wild. They just give you something to cling onto when you’ve realized you’ve digested too much writer acid.

(P.S: I still hate outlines.)

4. You Write What You Know

A tangential revelation that, in retrospect, should have been more obvious: you write what you know, and who you know.

Almost every character in RUPERT WONG, CANNIBAL CHEF is a person of color. There are only two individuals who are not and they’re side characters who exist in their situations because of their ethnicity. If you guessed they were white, you’re right.

Despite the recent push for diversity, I didn’t actually set out to be diverse, strange as that might be to say. Coming from Malaysia, people of color are the status quo. We’re Indian, Chinese, Malay, Kadazan, Dusun, Iban — the list goes on. White people, on the other hand, different. And that kind of bled through. I wrote what I knew: a metropolis where ghosts were almost real, a place where cultures intermingled, where pirated DVDs still abound. I borrowed from our myths and our urban legends. I borrowed from my ethnic culture. (I’m ethnically Chinese, but am a Malaysian citizen.) I borrowed from our ideas of the Western World, who they represented, and what they were.

Not once did I consider having a white main character because, you know, that isn’t how my world view works. In a weird way, it explained to me why the video game industry, for one, is absolutely saturated with white men. People automatically default to what is familiar, to what they recognize when they look around them. That which surrounds you defines your perspective of normal. Consequently, writing my little novella make me a little kinder towards all those people I might have held in suspicion before. Not everyone who writes a stubbled hero is a tunnel-visioned prat.

But at the same time, this doesn’t mean that people can’t and shouldn’t go out of their comfort zones. Video games, genre fiction, and all forms of entertainment can, and always will, benefit from having more voices, more experience. We’re shooting ourselves in the foot if we take the easy route and stick to the narrow scope of what we know. The world is vast, so vast that it’s almost crippling to consider, and if we can expand the breadth of ‘what we know’ to include even a tiny percentage of that enormity — who knows where we can go? I’m doing my damn best to learn from the cultures I encounter in my travels, and I totally recommend you join me in this experiment of mine. I promise you, it won’t suck.

6. Leaving Your Chair Is Good

I don’t know how Chuck does it. I mean, the sheer amount of words he writes in a seating. Jesus Christ. Every time I think about it, I get a bit woozy. The same could be same about any number of writers. (Brandon Sanderson, sir, how the respectful hell do you do it?) It’s genuinely intimidating as to how much people can write.

When I started writing RUPERT WONG, CANNIBAL CHEF, I tried to hold myself to similar standards. It didn’t work. I fizzled out really early, and ended up being burnt-out for a few weeks. I was absolutely crippled by my inability to do as well as the greats. But you know what I learned? You don’t really have to write every day. Not everyone has that capacity. And the moment I realized that, things worked better for me.

I started bolting from the proverbial chair whenever my brain grew sticky with bad prose. I walked away. I played a video game. I went for Muay Thai. I did other things. And that distance, even though it seemed unproductive at first, proved fantastic for me. I wrote more with breaks than without. I wrote more when I started forgiving myself for those hours when I could not. It shouldn’t seem like a revelation, but it was.

So, you. Get out of your chair if you’re having a block. Come back later. Eat a salad. Kiss a person you find attractive. Do something else. It is totally okay.

* * *

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

Cassandra Khaw: Website | Twitter

Rupert Wong: Amazon US | Amazon UK

The Shield, Daughter of the Revolution #1 — Out Now

HOLY CRAP, IT’S OUT.

Adam Christopher and I wrote a comic. Our first comic.

Drew Johnson drew it.

Kelly Fitzpatrick did the lettering.

And Rachel Deering did the colors.

AND NOW YOU CAN GO GET IT.

So, you should go get it.

Thanks to Alex Segura and Dark Circle for having us.

More to come. (And come see Adam and me in NYC on 11/3, and Doylestown, PA on 11/13.)

Thoughts On Canon, Part II: How To View New Stories

You may have heard there’s a new Star Wars movie.

Something something something Dark Side.

You may have also heard that there’s new novels, too.

Something something something fully gay lesbeans.

And I did a post a few weeks back about the false historicity of canon in terms of pop culture — we feel that it’s all very real, all a history rather than a story someone just made up, and we like to know what’s TRUE versus what’s FALSE in terms of the fictional historicity of the work. It’s both seductive and a little bit dangerous.

While I was at NYCC, at both panels I was at and also in person, folks wanted to talk about the EU and Legends. Politely, to be clear — I was not harangued by anyone. (If you go to the Del Rey Star Wars books Facebook page, you’ll find the same polite responses and requests – and you’ll find some of that haranguing.) Some folks generally have this sense of, if it’s not the thing I grew up with, if it’s not the thing I expect, then I don’t want it. You start to get that talk of childhoods being killed and all that fun stuff, as if people have traveled back in time to someone’s adolescent years in order to Fahrenheit 451 all their EU/Legends books, but only just before karate-kicking their original Star Wars VHS tapes into a cloud of plastic particulate matter.

While there at the con, I hit on a metaphor I like as to how to overcome this feeling that OLD IS BEST and NEW IS BAD and SOMETHING SOMETHING FIRE THE CANON CANNONS.

And I’m going to share this with you now in the hopes it helps you understand the silver lining, here — this is me trying to turn this feeling from a drain into a fountain.

You know Matt Groening, right? The Simpsons creator.

Well, once upon a time as some know, he did a comic called LIFE IN HELL. Amazing comic. Subversive and socially powerful, and also deeply absurdist fun. He hit on things with childhood and work and school and relationships — I still go back to read them from time to time.

In one of the comics, the one-eared rabbit boy, Bongo, is coloring with crayons.

And a bully comes along.

The bully then proceeds to break all of Bongo’s crayons in half. Snap, snap, snap.

Bongo, for many panels if I recall correctly, stares down at his crayons.

And you think, he’s upset.

He’s a kid.

A bully just broke all his crayons.

How could this not destroy him? Someone came along and destroyed the things he had in his hands. The things that he loved. He can’t create anymore. His crayons are ruined.

But then Bongo says: YAY.

And why does Bongo say yay?

Because, he explains, regarding his bounty of broken crayons: NOW I HAVE TWICE AS MANY.

You think someone broke your stories, your universe, your canon.

Instead, maybe envision it instead as YAY, NOW I HAVE TWICE AS MANY.

And then read it all greedily and happily, in glorious gulps and swallows.

Ilana C. Myer: What Do You Mean I Need Social Skills? (And Other Concerns)

Ilana has a debut fantasy novel out — Last Song Before Night — but before that, she’s done a lot of work as an accomplished blogger and freelance writer, so I’m excited to have her here to speak a bit about one skill most writers don’t think, or know, that they need…

* * *

As an author whose first book just came out from Tor, you could say I’ve achieved exactly what I set out to do. And I’ll be real: I set out to do it a long time ago. This is not one of those instances when the author takes up writing on a lark and a novel comes out. If only. It’s more like, when I was a teenager I decided to start taking seriously this dream I’d always had. I was already thirteen, it was time to get moving.

Maybe it’s because I was living in Jerusalem in the mid-90s and fully convinced — not entirely without reason — that I wouldn’t survive high school. (Buffy was to have incredible resonance, years later.) Being a kid, doing things like having fun or whatever, was a waste of time when life was short. (Plus, being in a class of kids who don’t speak your language is not that conducive to having fun either.) So I did two things. I read a lot, and critically. Whatever I read, I picked apart. I looked at the things that worked and tried to figure out why they worked so well. Sometimes I couldn’t figure it out, so I just reread those glorious sections repeatedly, as if to absorb them into my bloodstream. (In retrospect, this means I can open my old notebooks at random and be like, “Right, that’s when I was reading Dune.”)

Because another thing I was doing was writing my own novel. And I worked incessantly. By the end of high school I had completed the first volume of a projected epic fantasy trilogy. I had written it longhand in a series of notebooks. Teachers knew to be suspicious of these notebooks and occasionally they were confiscated.

Eventually I was to give up on the high school novel, dismissing it as too juvenile. I started a new one while still in college. That novel, in the course of years, became Last Song Before Night.

So this is great, right? I did it. I put focused effort into achieving my goal, by developing the skills necessary for that goal, and succeeded.

Fast-forward to this past year at Book Expo America, when I and three other debut authors had the honor of being on a panel hosted by John Scalzi. Except this wasn’t really a panel. It was a game, for the general public, of “Would You Rather?” We would get questions and need to answer them, cleverly, on the fly.

This was a foretaste of what it means to launch a novel out into the world. My calendar for October has been a series of public appearances, readings, another game of “Would You Rather” with Scalzi at New York Comic Con, and — incredibly — a  New England book tour with Fran Wilde and Seth Dickinson where we’ll be visiting five bookstores in five states in five days or something like that. And answering questions, and being witty, and hopefully impressing the ever-loving hell out of everyone.

I did not do a single damn thing in my life to prepare for this. And it’s made me reflect on this dissonant quality to being a writer: what makes us excel at our work, what gets our books to the level of being publishable, involves being alone, a lot. No matter how many workshops you attend, ultimately the work only gets done when it’s just you and the page. Or just you and the necessary act of reading. All of it intensely alone.

And now my success, or at least a good fraction of it, might hinge on how scintillating I can be in public appearances. I’ve been thinking back and realizing that authors’ behavior at their events has occasionally influenced my interest in their work. If an author seems brilliant and confident at an event, I think we are programmed to expect that same acumen reflected on the printed page.

But there’s one thing I’m learning: Experience helps. With five readings behind me, I’m starting to enjoy doing them. And at the recent panel at New York Comic Con, I was surprised to find that I was not nervous beforehand. I knew all eyes would be on me and I would be expected to make clever responses to surprise questions, but there was a corner of my brain, newly awakened, that said, “You’ve been here before. You’ve got this.”  And also: “Have fun.” Because hey, I finally have a book out. That is pretty awesome.

Now I’m not going to say it was all flawless, but it was better. And maybe that experience will pave the way to the next appearance being better. And the next one.

Recently I went to a consignment shop and found a designer red dress on sale for a ridiculously low price. Not deep red. Not maroon, which I’ve been wont to wear in the past. Shocking, fire engine red. The kind of thing I’d never have worn before, favoring instead more modest shades of blue or purple or green. I bought it.

I haven’t prepared for this, and there are going to be moments when a witty comeback eludes me, or people notice my hands shaking (this happens, especially if I haven’t eaten), or I am simply stumped for a response for several seconds (this has happened too). But if you see me at these events, and I am wearing the red dress, you’ll know I’m wearing it to remind myself that the time for solitary communing has passed. It’s time to be out in the world and visible among people, at least for now. I have a book out, the thing I’ve worked toward my whole life. This is no time to hide.

* * *

Ilana C. Myer has written for the Globe and Mail, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, and the Huffington Post. Previously she was a freelance journalist in Jerusalem for the Jerusalem Post, the Jewish Daily Forward, Time Out Israel and other publications. She lives in New York City.

Ilana C. Myer: Website | Twitter

Last Song Before Night: Indiebound | Amazon

About That Dumb Star Wars Boycott

*pinches bridge of nose*

*exhales noisily*

Of course there’s a Star Wars Episode VII boycott. And there’s a hashtag to boot. Because of course there’s a hashtag. One-click buffet-style serving of shittiness, coming right up.

(Behold, the Mary Sue article about it.)

Apparently people are mad because blah blah black dude protagonist with a lightsaber, or girl protagonist, or Latino X-Wing pilot protagonist, and not enough straight white dudes. And folks are mad enough to join in on the hashtag and — nngh. Bleh. Meh. Gnarrgh. I mean, what version of Star Wars did you watch? The one where Luke Skywalker is a racist hick shitbird? The one where the Empire are the good guys because yay oppression and fascism and totalitarian chic?

Okay, first, let’s talk about the efficacy of such a hashtag, which is to say, it will have literally no effect at all. You’re throwing pebbles at mountains, bro. Boycotting Star Wars is like boycotting the sun. It will do nothing. The sun will keep on shining. Its heat will remain radiant and globally present. It will remain at the center of this space and we will continue to orbit it in an elliptical manner. Your efforts will have no meaningful result except to reveal yourself as a cruddy dingleberry dangling from fandom’s ass-hairs.

My greatest desire is to yell at you. To just rant and gesticulate and do the internet dance of anger all over you, because what special dumbness, this is.

But instead I’m going to try to talk to you, in the assumption that somewhere out there in the seething throng of crappy people exists some who are not yet all the way gone to the Dark Side.

There is good in you. No, not you. Not you either. YOU. Right there.

I’m talking to those who can be reached.

As one straight white dude to other straight white dudes, let’s talk.

You are clearly consumers of sci-fi and fantasy pop culture, which is at least a little bit suggestive that somewhere under that stormtrooper mask is a brain with an imagination.

I want you now to imagine along with me, Mister Rogers-style.

Let’s imagine that you are, as you are now, a straight white dude. Except, your world features one significant twist — the SFF pop culture you consume is almost never about you. The faces of the characters do not look like yours. The creators of this media look nothing like you, either. Your experiences are not represented. Your voice? Not there. There exist in these universes no straight white dudes. Okay, maybe one or two. Some thrown in to appease. Sidekicks and bad guys and walk-on parts. Token chips flipped to the center of the table just to make you feel like you get to play, too. Oh, all around you in the real world, you are well-represented. Your family, your friends, the city you live in, the job you work — it’s straight white dude faces up and down the block. But on screen? In books? Inside comic panels and as video game characters? Almost none. Too few. Never the main characters.

It feels isolating, and you say so.

And as a response you’re told, “Hey, take what you get.” They say, can’t you have empathy for someone who doesn’t look like you? Something something humanist, something something equalist. And of course you can have that empathy because you have to, because this is all you know, because the only faces and words and experiences on-screen are someone else’s so, really, what else are you going to do?

Then one day, things start to change. A little, not a lot, but shit, it’s a start — you start to see yourself up there on the screen. Sometimes as a main character. Sometimes behind the words on the page, sometimes behind the camera. A video game avatar here, a protagonist there. And it’s like, WOO HOO, hot hurtling hell, someone is actually thinking about you once in a while. And the moment that happens, wham. A backlash. People online start saying, ugh, this is social justice, ugh, this is diversity forced down our throats, yuck, this is just bullshit pandering quota garbage SJW — and you’re like, whoa, what? Sweet crap, everyone else has been represented on screen since the advent of film. They’ve been on the page since some jerk invented the printing press. But the moment you show up — the moment you get more than a postage stamp-sized bit of acreage in this world that has always been yours but never really been yours, people start throwing a shit-fit. They act like you’re unbalancing everything. Like you just moved into the neighborhood and took a dump in everybody’s marigolds just because you exist visibly.

You have 100 toys, and someone comes along and asks for a toy of their own, and you start screaming about DIVERSITY SJW GENOCIDE REVERSE RACISM SEXISM AAAAAAH.

That’s fucked up, right?

That’s what’s happening, except it’s not happening to you.

I was at NYCC this year and last, and a friend — the artist known as Joey Hi-Fi — pointed out quite correctly that the audience at NYCC is incredibly diverse. And they are at NYCC consuming media that is incredibly not-diverse. I saw it in my own signings. The people who came up and had me sign books at 47 North or for Star Wars? Not a bunch of straight white guys. A lot of women. A lot of faces that were not my own. And some self-identified LGBT folks, too. That’s awesome. Awesome in a lot of ways. Awesome because the audience is bigger than anybody expected. Awesome because it’s expressive of a world that is not singular, not simple, that is far-reaching and full of variety and tons of people who don’t look or act at all like each other but still find common ground in cool stuff like Star Wars. And it’s also sad because, y’know, the content is not equal to the audience. The stories have not yet caught up to reality. That’s true on the page, on the screen, and behind the scenes with the creators and the executives and everything.

Listen, I get it — this problem is not my problem. Inclusion isn’t for me. I’m covered. I am already included. Luke? Me. Han Solo? Me. Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon, Anakin, Wedge, me, me, me. And it’s not just Star Wars. John McClane, Harry Potter, Frodo, Iron-Man. All a bunch of white guys saving the day. Hell, Santa Claus. Or damn near every painting of Jesus, who was clearly not a white guy but is often depicted as a white guy. We do our level best to paint ourselves as the heroes of our own narrative. It’s white guys all the way down. I’m golden over here. I don’t need more representation. I have had my fill to the point where my pop culture belly is a-burstin.

In fact, I’m so glutton-fed I figure it’s time for a diet.

Which is why I’ve tried very hard to vary my reading. Which is why in Aftermath the protagonists are: a Mom, a gay dude, a lady bounty hunter. It’s why the Imperial antagonist is a powerful woman of color. (I’m no culture hero here, to be clear — I did the bare minimum in including different characters. It’s not like I have Sinjir engaging in sweaty man-love with Wedge Antilles. He is gay and he is present and he is visible and that has been enough to conjure  100+ negative reviews and an unholy host of comments, hate mails, and social media ‘interactions.’ Don’t believe me? Here’s four pages of reviews — 1, 2, 3, 4 — and that’s just me searching for the term “homosexual” across the one-star reviews. It’s just the tip of that septic shitberg.)

Point is, I don’t need to see me on the page as often as I have. And while I wouldn’t want to steal someone’s voice and make it my own, at the same time, in a sci-fi novel, I think we’re okay. And writers of any salt or stripe are expected to know how to write beyond the singular experience of being who you are. And readers should be able to read just as capably. What, you can get behind a protagonist who is a dragon, or a Wookiee, or an animated monster, but you can’t get behind another human being who looks different? You gotta have some empathy. No one can make you understand different people. You have to try. You gotta draw the bridge between you and other humans. It exists. But you have to see it. You have to believe in it. You have to be the one to reach out and look for the similarities of experience, not just the differences. (But differences matter, too. And it’s important to grok why that is and not erase those differences or those experiences.)

You gotta realize the world isn’t for you.

It’s for everyone.

And that needs to start happening in media, too.

Nice thing with Star Wars is, it is happening. Look at the protagonists of The Force Awakens. Look at Lucasfilm. They’re openly committing to finding a woman director for Star Wars. Kathleen Kennedy notes: “Fifty percent of our executive team are women. Six out of eight of the people in my Story Group are women. I think it’s making a huge difference in the kind of stories we’re trying to tell.” Some of the story group are also people of color. It’s a start. Especially when it’s starting in one of the biggest SFF franchises ever. Perfect? No. Nothing is. But it’s nice to see changes happening. It’s nice to see some equity there between the audience that consumes this stuff and the people who make it. Stories matter to people. Characters matter. Creation matters. Nobody should be excluded. Inclusion is awesome.

And if you oppose that — you know, hey, fuck you. Go on and throw pebbles at mountains. Go on and boycott the sun. Let me know how that works out for you.

Meanwhile, I’m gonna be over here enjoying what’s to come. I suggest trying it. Loving stuff instead of hating it. Accepting the world as it is, not the world as you mistakenly hope it will be.

To everyone else: may the Force be with you.

And hey — NEW TRAILER TONIGHT.

*teeth vibrate with sonic joy*

*fingers become lightsabers*

*wampa roar*