Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 143

In Which I Emit A Lot Of Grr-Talk About Your Writing Career

Here, have this.

It’s a Storify where I, for little to no reason, put on my ranty-trousers and danced around Twitter, grumping about Your Writing Career. (I’m embedding it below, as well, but embed efforts from some sites can be iffy here at the blog. So, assuming it does not embed correctly, you can use that link above. Feel free to embrace, ignore, or abuse accordingly.)

[View the story “Rantypanties Grr-Talk About Writery Things” on Storify]

Writing Is A Profane, Irrational, Imperfect Act

Writing is a profane act.

I don’t literally mean in the FUCK THIS, SHIT THAT way (though for me that tends to be true enough just the same). But I mean profane in the classic sense: it’s a heretical, disrespectful act. Crass! Irreverent! Writing and storytelling is this… nasty task of taking the perfect idea that exists in your head and shellacking it all up by dragging it through some grease-slick fontanelle in order to make it real. You’re just shitting it all to hell, this idea. You have it in your mind: golden and unbreakable. And then in reality, ugh. You’ve created a herky-jerky simulacrum, a crude facsimile of your beautiful idea run through the copy machine again and again until what you started with is an incomprehensible spread of dong-doogle hieroglyphics.

The end result will never match the expectation.

You will never get it just right.

The idea is God: perfect, divine, incapable of repudiation, utterly untouchable.

The result is Man: fumbling, foolish, a jester’s mockery, a bundle of mistakes in tacky pants.

Nobody is good enough to tell the stories and ideas inside them. I mean that sincerely. The ideas in my head are shining beams of light, perfect and uninterrupted. And when they finally exist on paper, they end up fractured and imperfect — beams of light through grungy windows and shattered prisms, shot through with motes of dust, filtered up, watered down.

But sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes, a beam of light is still a beam of light no matter how diffuse it is, no matter how dirty the light, no matter how filthy the floor is that it illuminates. And when it’s not enough, you keep on trying until it is. Because eventually, it becomes that. The only reason it doesn’t become that isn’t a lack of skill or talent, but giving up before that lack of skill or talent shows up on the page. The only true failure is giving up and giving in.

I write this in response to a colleague who was talking on Facebook about the ideas in his head never matching the expression of those ideas, whether from a lack of skill or talent or intelligence. Thing is, it’s true. My colleague is right. Those things will never match. No matter how hard you try, because the only way to get our stories out of our heads and into your heads we first need to translate them into mundane language. And when you translate one language into another, you introduce imperfections, inaccuracies, misunderstandings. You move the Bible from Enochian angeltongue to Aramaic to Greek to Latin to English and you lose something vital — once, the Bible was about a guy named Dave who saved the Galaxy with his unicorn army. Now it’s blah blah blah something about “Jesus” and “loving one another.” Writing is always this: an adaptation of the sacred into smut. Dragging the divine out of his Sky Chariot and into the human dirt.

But me, I like that aspect.

I like making God into sausages.

I like dragging those angels down into the slurry, dirtying their wings, breaking their harps.

I like translating the beautiful celestial song and grunting it in our human chimp-shrieks.

Because that’s the only way it will ever exist.

Because if there’s one thing that is imperfect about perfection –

It’s that it’s too perfect to live.

It’s unreal. And I don’t truck much with unreality.

Writing unwritten is a promise unfulfilled. I’d rather make the promise and complete it badly than make the promise and never even try. A story untold is a life unlived. What’s the point? If you want to do this thing, you have to set yourself up against unrealistic expectations. You cannot combat perfection because perfection? That smiling, shiny jerk always wins. You do what you do, crass and irreverent as it may be, because committing heresy in the name of art is far better than huffing invisible God-farts and cleaving only to invisible philosophy.

We’re told to do no harm.

But sometimes, you have to trample pretty daisies to get where you’re going.

This also means setting for yourself realistic, reasonable metrics for success. A day’s worth of writing is a success. Finishing the thing is a success. Separate that out from the aspect of professional, business success. You can’t control that kind of success, though you can maximize your luck and that means first finishing what you begin. If you want to create? Create. If you want to write and tell stories, do that. Don’t give yourself over to unkind, cruel standards. Judge yourself fairly. Work despite perfect expectations. Those who try to master perfection will always fall to those who iterate, and reiterate, and create, and recreate. Art is better than philosophy. Creation, however clumsy, is always better than sitting on your hands and fearing what damage they can do.

Kill the perfect. Slay the angels. Fuck the gods.

You’re human. You’ll get it wrong. Everybody gets it wrong.

But getting it wrong is the only way you get close to getting it right.

Flash Fiction Challenge: Random Cocktail Challenge

This week’s challenge?

I want you to click this link: generate random cocktail.

It will, predictably, give you a random cocktail and its recipe.

(If for some reason that link doesn’t work: try this one. It gives you 10 at a time.)

The title of the random cocktail is the title of your new flash fiction story.

You have ~1000 words.

Due by next Friday, 3/20. Noon EST.

Post at your online space. Link to it in the comments below.

What I Think About Andrew Smith And What He Said

I think that what he said was honest.

I think that punishing him for honesty and a sincere effort to do better misses the mark.

I think that what he said wasn’t very smart.

I think there were better ways to say what he said, or what he (probably) meant.

I think I say a lot of things that aren’t very smart, and some of them are probably here in this post.

I think I probably shouldn’t even write this post, but here I am.

I think I am sexist sometimes and I don’t mean to be.

I think I’m going to get it wrong.

I think I’m scared of getting it wrong.

I think I don’t know what I’ll do when that happens, and I hope I’ll be good but maybe I won’t.

I think that one interview answer is not enough to judge the content of a person, nor is it enough evidence to apply a broad-sweeping label.

I think that sometimes writers are better left writing things down rather than speaking them aloud because you can’t go back, you can’t rethink, you can’t edit words that are spoken to, say, an interviewer in what once might’ve seemed an innocuous interview.

I think feminism is more than one thing, and I think sexism is more than one thing, too.

I think it’s important to look for patterns rather than aberrations.

I think we should view people as a spectrum, not as binary black and white.

I think it’s good we talk about these things.

I think it’s sad we tear people down because of these things.

I think it’s critical to recognize that what Smith said will earn him harsh words, but what women say earn them death threats or threats of rape.

I think good people can say the wrong things.

I think it’s important to acknowledge those wrong things.

I think it’s important to still acknowledge that people are bigger than the wrong things they sometimes might say and that we are more than the sum of a single mistake.

I think women are used to being erased and are justifiably angry about that.

I think that women are not aliens, nor mysterious beings, nor bizarre riddles.

I think men should learn to write fully-realized characters, regardless of gender and color.

I think we can all be scared though of getting that wrong and can be paralyzed by it.

I think his comments were an unintended symptom of a larger problem.

I think that criticism of what he said does not amount to bullying.

I think that criticism of who he is, does.

I think that social media can be a scary place sometimes.

I think mobs can form without us realizing it.

I think that shame is a bad way to get people to change and that encouraging them to take their medicine is a good way to get them to not want to take their medicine.

I think that conversation and dialogue is vital, and anger is often righteous.

I think snark is funny, but probably doesn’t help.

I think people can become mean even when they don’t intend to be, myself included.

I think that many snowflakes can fast become a blizzard or even an avalanche.

I think that outrage and anger is real and just because you don’t agree with it doesn’t mean you need to invalidate it.

I think that outrage is not automatically validated by its existence, either.

I think that sometimes the response to a thing can become bigger than the thing.

I don’t think women should be quiet.

I don’t think Andrew Smith should be quiet, either.

I think empathy is a powerful thing.

I think empathy and logic must work in concert.

I think that what I think probably doesn’t amount to much but I think it anyway.

I think Andrew Smith is an amazing writer, a bona fide talent, an irreplaceable voice.

I think he’s a good person who does good things and maybe that matters to you, maybe it doesn’t.

I think that we are the tally of the good and bad things we do and hopefully that balances out.

I think he had a hard life and dealt with abuse and maybe that matters to you, maybe it doesn’t.

I think that authors are not their characters, nor are they their books, but that authors have responsibility just the same — how far that responsibility goes or what it even is, I’m not sure.

I know that I will one day want my son to read Andrew Smith’s books.

I think we can all do better.

I think we all deserve better.

* * *

For your reading: the original VICE interview.

A longer EW interview with him (noting abuse he endured from his parents).

Tessa Gratton’s Tumblr: “Andrew Smith and Sexism.”

Phoebe North’s perspective is here.

Comments are closed. (Little time to do proper moderation.)

Thank you for reading.

How To Make The Most Out Of A Writing Critique: Ten Tips

As you are a Certified Penmonkey — *stamps your head with the ancient sigil* — you will at various intersections be forced to endure a critique of your work. I don’t mean bad reviews, though those will line up, too, and you will run their gauntlet as they whack you about the head and neck with their bludgeoning sadness.

No, I mean a proper critique. Knives out. Blood on the paper.

You will receive this critique from:

Beta Readers

Friends

Agents

Editors

Other Writers

Probably Your Mother At Some Point.

When I say, you have to make the most out of these critiques, I don’t mean emotionally. Receiving critique for me is — emotionally! — like being a trashcan full of old liquor bottles set on fire. Flames. Lots of fumes. A great deal of shattering. Black, heinous smoke. No, no, I mean there exists a pragmatic side to receiving critique, and it’s not just what you do with the critiques you get but it’s also how you set yourself up for them.

You must maximize this experience.

You must squeeze this fruit of its funky juiciness.

You must milk this beast of its vitalmost lactations.

You must ejaculate –

*receives note*

Ah! See. A fair critique. I’m going to stop there.

Let’s get to the tips!

Behold Its Definition

As always, value exists in defining our terms before we discuss them. So:

Critique is not criticism. Not in its entirety. It is an analysis of the work. A critical, intelligent analysis. It’s not tearing the thing apart. It’s not building it up. It’s breaking it into its constituent pieces, examining them, then putting them back together to see how it all works. It is an assessment, not a hit piece. Editors do not cackle madly upon seeing a story, growing sexually frantic over the chance to maul your work the way a bear might maul a couple of teenagers banging in a zipped-up sleeping bag.

To Receive Critique, Give Critique

If critique is an alien animal to you, if its anatomy is mysterious and impossible to dissect, you will not know the value of what went into a critique of your work — or what to take from it. Thus: perform the ancient art of critique. This can be as part of a, “If you perform an anatomy on my story-corpse, I’ll perform an anatomy on your story-corpse,” but it doesn’t have to be. It might literally be you picking up somebody else’s published book and then… well, finding the holes in that bucket. Where does the work go wrong? Where does it go right? How does the whole thing work? It’s not just about good and bad, but also about figuring out how all the pieces fit.

Learn To Read Critically

All this means, too, that you must learn to read critically. One of the best and worst things about being a writer is that it grants you a kind of narrative X-Ray vision. Over time, after writing a whole motherfucking lot, you start reading stories with the Critical Analysis button jammed permanently ON. You start to notice the Matrix Code behind the world, and you can see the mechanics of the narrative behind the narrative. It sucks sometimes because reading for pleasure gets a helluva lot harder (and this further translates over to any other storytelling medium), but it helps you also gain a new appreciation of the work in front of you. Gone is the pleasure of turning off your brain. Here is the pleasure of being able to crack the bones and suck out the marrow. A pleasure of details, of assessment, of learning to understand and see what you think the writer was going for — you’re no longer in the audience of the magician, wowed by the illusions on stage.

Now you’re a fellow magician trying to suss out the trick.

Practice this skill.

Read everything.

Pick it apart as you do.

Get Critiqued A Whole Fucking Lot

If you want to be a writer: write a lot. Want to run a marathon? Run a lot. Want to make sure you’re the best tiger-fucker the world has ever seen? You guessed it — you are going to have to fuck a lot of tigers. (Sidenote: please do not have sex with any tigers. Tigers are en endangered species and they have had it hard enough without you trying to sex them up. Everything I say here is metaphor. No tiger sexing. Tiger sexting, however, is totally cool. Even recommended.)

What I’m trying to say is, the same thing applies here.

If you want to receive critique effectively –

Then receive a lot of critiques.

It’s like this: you know how the first time you have sex (*not with tigers) it’s really weird, awkward, and there’s that panel of old men behind the Plexiglas holding up your score on yellow notebook paper? Maybe that last part is just me. Point is, the first time you “do it” (tee hee), you don’t really know what you like. Or what your partner likes. It’s like smashing two pork roasts together — inelegant and almost certainly ineffective.

The first time you receive a critique, it’s hard to be sure what to make of it. Is it right? Wrong? And what the fuck are you even supposed to do with it, now? But you get ten, twenty, a hundred of these sets of critical notes across not just one story but several, and you start cultivating instinct. All the practical advice in the world will never trump your gut. But you aren’t born with that, and you have to build up to it.

So: open yourself to critique.

A whole goddamn lot of it.

Know Your Audience

Be aware of who is critiquing you. Blind critique is fine, but it’s also useful to have a sense of the person at the other end of the rope. Example: a literary-minded editorreading your science-fiction story isn’t automatically a bad choice for a critique, but it may color the critique you receive. You shouldn’t dismiss the commentary, but you also shouldn’t let it be the ONE TRUE MESSAGE UNSWERVING IN ITS SCRUTINY. If the agent reading your work reps a lot of science-fiction but not fantasy and your book is fantasy — well, just go in with your eyes open on that one.

Then Choose The Right Audience

Over time, you start to to develop a sense of who you should go to when it’s time to receive critique. A set of editors, a particular agent, a selected cabal of beta readers, the magical word sorcerer that hides at the bottom of a whiskey bottle. You begin to choose your critique partners. Not because they’re your friends, but because what comes out of the partnership are bona fide results. Results, here — actionable results, a map drawn with new directions — are the goal.

Beware Shining Adoration And Perfection

If a critique is all just fawning ecstasy and delight, and your only possible response is to squeegee the love juice off the manuscript’s pages, then you’d better find someone who is willing to tell you the truth. Or, at the very least, be more incisive in their analysis.

No book is perfect.

Truth is rarely kind.

Beware Ultimate Hatred And Destruction

Alternately, you should fear those who just wanna tear your work like, ten new assholes, too. Maybe it’s that they’re the wrong audience for the book. Maybe it’s that they have mis-defined critique and believe that their goal is to rip the story to bloody tatters. Maybe they’re passive-aggress bungholes who delight in the suffering of others. I’ve gotten a few of these in my life (one rejection from a lit journal about twenty years ago exhorted me to quit writing because of how utterly horrible I was). You can do nothing but ignore them. Maybe there’s value in there, but it gets hard to suss out when all you get is just a mouthful of venom.

Ignore hate-fests.

Definitely shove aside any critique with insults and snark embedded in.

Look For Patterns And Potholes

One critique has some value. But several critiques offers you the power of patterns. If three people say the same thing — blah blah blah, that character doesn’t have enough agency, that plot point doesn’t make sense, why is the story narrated by one of those dancing windsocks you see out front of car dealerships? Then okay, that’s worth a long, hard squint. If one person says THIS DOESN’T WORK but nine others say it works? Maybe that’s not so deserving of your attention.

Also worth realizing that critique is a curious animal. We are driven to not only point out deficiencies but then also to fill those deficiencies — it’s a noble goal, but what it ends up being for you, the writer, is that the reader will tell you both a) what’s wrong and b) how to fix it.

Pay attention to a).

But ignore b).

Their solution needn’t be your solution.

Look past the offered fix — they want to paint the room the colors they like.

Take away the message that a fix is needed — but then provide your own repairs.

As Always, Be Willing To Act

Most importantly:

TAKE ACTION.

Critique can be paralyzing. We receive it and then, shell-shocked, we sit and stare at our hands. Or we feel bad. Or uncertain what direction to jump. Uncertainty is a killer. Fear and doubt will hamstring you near the finish line. You’ve already written something. But who said you were done? Now it’s time to take what you’ve learned and apply it. A critique is not purely an intellectual exercise. It isn’t just for shits and giggles.

Always plan to use them. Somehow. Some way.

Act on the intel you receive. Otherwise: what’s the point?

* * *

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

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Kids Are Super Ultra Mega Fucking Weird

You poor fuckers.

You have no idea what’s coming.

Our baby goat — *is handed note* — sorry, “baby human child” will soon turn four. And you’re saying, “Uhh, it’s a bit early to be warning those of us on the road behind you. You’re like, uhhh, ten feet ahead of us.” And that sounds right. Seems accurate. I’ve got another 14 years or so before we eject this goat child into the real world with a forceful slam of the door (“TIME’S UP, NERD,” I will yell, and fling his stuff on the front lawn and then change all the locks while he’s scrambling to pick up all his weird cyborg porn or whatever’s ‘cool’ in 14 years). And parents ahead of us on the road have been warning us about all the things that will one day manifest in and around our kidling. Some of it has been right. Some of it has been so right, they had no idea. Some of it? Totally wrong. Just the same, I feel like it’s my responsibility to warn those of you with children younger than ours — perhaps even those with children that remain pre-born).

Because I see you.

I see how complacent you are.

For those of you without kids, lemme ask you: can you just like, go somewhere? Can you decide on a whim, “I am going to pee in private, then I will shower, then I plan to leave my house and go out into the world to eat food, dance, take a walk, buy a dog, buy groceries, participate in an orgy, fly a kite, kill a man, meet people, party with those people, buy IKEA furniture for my sex dungeon,” and so on, and so forth? Right. That shit ends.

For those of you with infants or babies: can you put your child down somewhere and be fairly confident that the child will remain in that space for fifteen minutes? If you return to the room, are you comfortable assuming that the child will still be somewhere near to where you left it? You won’t find the TV knocked over, clothes strewn everywhere, the window open with the curtains blowing in a breeze, a postcard from Tijuana stuck to your bedroom mirror with thumbprints of dried strawberry jelly? Yeah, eventually they get mobile.

Kids.

They get loud.

They get mobile.

And most importantly, they get weird.

They get weird quickly. The volume on their Weirdness goes from a 2, maybe a 3, all the way up to 11 pretty fast. Then they break the knob off and stab you in the neck with it.

I like to tell B-Dub stories online, and occasionally folks think I’m making them up.

I am not.

These are true things.

I would like to tell you some of the things we have seen. We are shell-shocked, like people who have witnessed something incomprehensible — an alien abduction, two Yetis making love, or this woman doing this thing with this carrot.

Please behold our tales. And tell others. Tell others what is to come.

Skeletons

The other night, B-Dub says: “There are skeletons everywhere.”

Which is true enough, one supposes, though it’s still pretty creepy when your preschooler just says that shit out of the blue. Either he can peer through our costumes of human meat to see what lurks beneath, or he’s legit seeing skeletons everywhere. And he said it in this kind of non-chalant, one-off way. Like, yeah, so what? Skeletons everywhere.

We thought that might be the end of that, but oh, no.

The next day at lunch, he starts yammering — because that’s a thing our child does now, he out-and-out babbles. Like he got an upgrade to his Language Module and is excited to use it. And he performs this monologue about skeletons, once again in a non-chalant yeah-so-what way:

“I saw a skeleton at the window this morning. And I threw something at him to make him go away. Yeah. And right now there are skeletons everywhere. They’re at the windows. They’re at the doors. There’s some right there.” *he points at the kitchen window* “I’ll punch him.” *he lazily punches both fists at the air* “Yeah. I don’t know where all these skeletons keep coming from. They’re in my room. They’re just like, running around and stuff. Yeah. They’re just so annoying. Sometimes I have to blast them.” *holds up both hands as if he’s shooting lasers out of his palms* “Skeletons. Yeah.”

He says all of this with the near boredom of a plumber describing a plumbing job. Like he’s actively irritated at the invading and presumably imaginary skeletons. I half-expected an eye-roll — and when B-Dub eye-rolls it’s notable — his eyes literally go all the way back and he rotates his entire head on his neck like he’s having a seizure. Don’t believe me? Look:

 

Anyway.

What I’m trying to say is:

There are skeletons everywhere, and my son realizes it.

Skeletons. Yeah.

This Song

Now, B-Dub doesn’t just gabble and yammer.

He sings.

Which is nice. He’s got a surprisingly good voice.

But again, his songs? Super gonzo bonanza weird.

Half the time, they’re total nonsense. Utter gibberish. So much so that I’m fairly certain he’s summoning Outer Entities (who are probably responsible for all these skeletons).

The most recent song goes like this:

FLOMMO GLOPPO!

FLOMMO GLOPPO!

JELLY JELLY!

JELLY JELLY!

That’s his song. I don’t know what it means. I do not know where it comes from. I do know that every time he sings it, the air shimmers, and reality fragments like light through a prism, and I can see squirming things on the other side of the veil — interstitial creatures, mad toddlers from beyond space and time, many-eyed precognitive preschoolers with sticky jam-hands and a hunger for incalculable geometries (and chocolate milk).

Constant Flailing

The boy is constantly moving. Even when he’s sitting still, he is flailing. You will be sitting there in the living room, and one second he’s just hanging out, playing with some LEGO, and next thing you know, he’s somehow on the couch, upside-down. Then he’s in your lap and he’s kneeing you in the face. Then he’s swinging from the ceiling fan. Then he’s piloting an F-111 stealth bomber. Then he’s on the moon. He’s like a teleporting orangutan.

He can’t stop moving. Watching him will make you dizzy. If ever we enter into another energy crisis, I will submit a plan to harness the energy of four-year-olds. Just seven of those wiggly little weirdos could power an entire city with all that kinetic razzmatazz.

That’s right. I said “razzmatazz.”

It’s scientific, you wouldn’t understand.

The Poop Reversal

Poop is still a hot topic at our house, which I suppose is good news because I find it endlessly hilarious. B-Dub will sometimes just go on a litany of poop-related phrases, “Duck poop, poop butt, TV poop, Hulk poop, poop doggy,” and on and on. One of his favorite activities at present is me firing up SIRI on the iPhone and then we say these poop-related phrases to her. SIRI responds by telling us we’re not being very nice, and B-Dub cracks up.

But poop isn’t just a topic of conversation.

It’s a way of life.

Earlier I noted that kids go through these bizarre and unexpected phases, some of them quite short. One of B-Dub’s phases was: “Refusing to poop.” Which led eventually to him having to poop so much and so bad that what he deposited in the potty looked to belong not to a tiny human but rather a morbidly-obese, pizza-roll-addicted yak.

As I said, we tried incentivizing the process.

A few weeks ago, we switched gears and changed the incentive.

It was these crunchy chocolate “rocks.”

It became these little chocolate hearts.

Hardly a change at all, right?

It worked.

It worked well.

It worked too well.

Now, our child has developed super-human control over how much he poops. It’s as if his butt is a paper cutter, like he has robotic control where he can leave behind a turd that is roughly the size and shape of a slice of hot dog. Then he’s all, “Hey, look! I pooped! GUESS IT’S TIME FOR MORE CHOCOLATE.” And we scrounge up a tiny piece of chocolate and he eats it greedily like he’s Gollum with a fresh-caught trout in his hands. It happens like, 47 times a day. We are going to give our child diabetes because of how much chocolate he gets to eat because of his newfound preternatural poop control. Once more we pull back the incentive in the hopes that the habit has taken and that he will shake the POOP = CHOCOLATE habit before he reaches adulthood because otherwise, man, his life will maintain its current weirdness trajectory. (“Hey, boss? I just took a poopy in the men’s bathroom. Don’t look at me like that. Just hand over the Snickers. It’s my reward. GIVE ME THE GODDAMN SNICKERS, OLD MAN, OR I QUIT.”)

Other Things B-Dub Has Said

Here is a list of things B-Dub has said recently.

“I HATE THIS HOUSE. I DO NOT WANT TO LIVE HERE ANYMORE. I WANT TO LIVE AT TARGET. I AM LEAVING.”

“Mustard butt! Cookie dude! Big red bed head! Fridge!”

“GOOD MORNING, BATMAN. I HAVE SOME NEW MOVES.”

“I’m the Flash. I have powers like super-strength and heat breathing. But I can’t fly.”

“I have a baby in my tummy.”

“YOU BE INCREDIBLE HULK. I’LL BE A BABY PANDA.”

Me: “What do you want for breakfast?” Him: “I want to eat fresh snow. It will taste like chicken.”

“My poop looks like dinosaur feet.”

“SWEET DREAMS, REFRIED BEEF!”

“I have a baby cardinal.” *pause* “I do not have a baby cardinal. But I should. And if I did, it would be really cute.”

“The silverfish are all alone. So alone. They need me to find them.”

*hands me a headless LEGO figure* “Now he has a ghost head.”

Me: “What do you want for breakfast?” Him: “A glass of wine.”

*hands me his stuffed animal doggy* Him: “Boo is sick. He needs a doggy doctor.”  Me: “What’s wrong with him?” Him: “He was jumping in dungeons.”

*points to me* “All of this is buttness. Your feet, your arms, your shoulder. But not your head. Everything else is poop-butty.”

*gives me a correct lecture on the difference between ‘transparent’ and ‘translucent.’*

“Daddy, you’re full of teacups.”

*gesticulates wildly at the dinner table* “I AM A ROBOT. WHY ARE MY ARMS MOVING.” *pause* “I like robots. I am a robot. I like: flowers, rainbows, owls, doggies, glasses, DVDs, colors, and carrots.” *pauses to ponder this, then repeats the list again*

*points to his butt* “This is my energy compartment” *he toots* “That’s my energy release.”

See?

Kids? Super-weird.

And if yours haven’t gotten there yet, they will.

They will.

Want To See The New Miriam Black Book Covers?

WELL, I CAN HELP YOU WITH THAT.

So, here’s the thing. I tend to be very lucky with book covers. Some authors struggle to get great book covers out in the world, but so far, I’ve won that lottery damn near every time, with a rare exception here or there. (Related: did you see that Barnes & Noble did an exclusive cover reveal of my upcoming “hackers versus an NSA artificial intelligence” book, Zer0es?) The original Miriam Black covers were pretty much the perfect example of this — Joey Hi-Fi did a trio of covers that were images that lovingly encapsulated the books, and each image was itself a collection of smaller images. They played particularly well on-screen (though maybe less so in the physical, where the mass market paperback size made some of the details harder to parse). They were beautiful, and so, when it came time for SAGA Press to step up and create new covers for the book — obviously, I felt some apprehension in my gut.

Turns out, though? I had no reason to worry.

Simon & Schuster was eager to make these covers as iconic as their former ones, and were equally interested in hearing my thoughts along the way. And the trick about creating new covers for these books is, you need them to be as distinctive, but at the same time, not ape the former covers. You can’t out Joey Hi-Fi Joey-Hi-Fi. He is at the top of his game, so you gotta go different. But you also can’t go so different that nothing of the original remains, right? Right.

So, I’m pleased to reveal:

The brand new Miriam Black covers.

These covers are done by the artist Adam S. Doyle (his website here). Adam did the covers for the beautiful Maggie Stiefvater books (behold: Raven Boys). He does amazing work.

When, you may be asking, will the Miriam books be on sale?

The new e-books should land next month: 4/21.

Then, for print, there will be a rolling series of releases:

Blackbirds: 9/28.

Mockingbird: 10/6.

Cormorant: cough cough sometime a few weeks later

The fourth book, Thunderbird will come out in early 2016 in print and e-book.

No scheduled dates on the last two books in the series.

(Stay tuned for more news and some cool giveaways.)

So, wanna see the covers already?

YES OF COURSE YOU DO.

 

 

Authors And Their Opinions

I see an article is going around, apparently from the RWR (the Romance Writers Report, which is connected to the RWA), that talks about how authors should deal with controversial topics — which is to say, the article seems to suggest that they should take a very soft, inoffensive, middle-of-the-road, milquetoasty approach. Just smile, it seems to say. Think of England.

Here, you’ll see author Racheline Maltese offering up a few snapshots of the article.

(I don’t have the original article to go on.)

(I don’t suspect this is an RWA “official” stance.)

(I don’t even know who wrote it.)

You’ll note that it mentions both gay marriage and racism via Ferguson.

Given that romance writers are generally women, it sounds troublingly like asking them to be more lady-like and not speak about issues that would trouble others — do not, it suggests, get all uppity and think that people want to hear your opinion on issues of import. You might further infer from there that women aren’t… something enough to opine such important matters. Not smart enough? Not savvy enough? Not man enough?

Here I’m aware that there’s a danger of me squeezing myself sideways into this conversation, as I am a) not a woman and b) not a romance writer, and you’d probably be well served by going and reading a lot of the discussion around the topic via women authors who are far smarter and better connected to this subject than I am (again, Racheline Maltese’ feed is a good place to dive into and branch out of this subject). And I know that there’s always a danger that when I get up on this rickety soapbox I’ve made out of old toilets and broken chains of binary code that it seems like AH FINALLY THE MANS HAVE SPOKEN, and then I wave my plunger — er, scepter — at you and everything feels altogether more official. I also know that I can say crazy shit and people will applaud, and maybe that’s not a luxury everybody has.

Hopefully, this doesn’t feel like that, and if it does, I’m sorry.

That said, I think there’s a larger, broader question about if any writer of any genre should speak out about reportedly controversial subjects.

And, my answer to that is, holy shit, yes.

With the caveats of:

a) if you want to.

b) if you can do it without being horrible to other people.

Nobody should make you speak out about controversial subjects. It can be uncomfortable to engage in that kind of conversation online — you might end up with an Asshole Magnet firmly bolted to your forehead. Some people’s milkshakes bring the boys to the yard, but other people’s milkshake bring all the trolls to the Twitter conversation. You might not be up for stomping that many ants or throwing rocks at wasp nests.

Further, if you do choose to speak out about controversial subjects, just don’t be horrible about it. This is a stickier wicket, of course, because you’re probably always going to be somebody’s asshole in that kind of conversation — I can say, politely as I can muster, “Gay marriage is a civil rights and humans rights issue, please and thank you,” and somebody out there in InternetLand is going to immediately going to think I’m a walking, talking, tweeting, blogging pile of demonic excrement. And the wicket gets even stickier when women and LGBT authors and persons of color have long been told to play nice, don’t get angry, don’t stand up too tall or too loud, and my intent here is not to slick this slope with Astroglide so you zip down it right back into the valley of just be nice and sell books. By horrible I mean, outright shitty. I mean, beating people down, or bullying them, or threatening harm. The very nadir of human behavior.

Now, with that said –

Why should authors speak up and speak out?

Because you’re writers, that’s why.

Writers know the power of words. Words change the world. Words have always been more effective at bullets when it comes to changing both the present and the future (and, in some ways, the past) — writing and storytelling have been a part of the human code since we figured out how to mash berries and streak red goop across cave walls with the decisive swipe of one of our hairy thumbs. Words make a difference. Stories move the fucking needle.

Ah, but: will you lose sales?

Could be, rabbit, could be.

But, I want you to ponder:

a) if you lost sales due to your having an opinion (gasp), did you want those sales in the first place?

b) if a reader doesn’t care for you or your opinions, will that reader actually like your book?

c) have you also thought about the sales you may have gained?

Let’s tackle that last one — “c.”

In my experience, having an opinion has lost me a sale here and there. I note this only because once in a while I actually get people saying, “CHAZ WENDING JUST LOST HIMSELF A SALE” and at first I’m like, “Jeez, who the hell is Chaz Wending and do I need to fight him?” but then I’m like, “OHHH they misspelled my name.”

But for every lost sale, I’ve seen more folks say they’ve bought my books because of me having an opinion. People want to read books by human beings, not marketing platforms. Human beings are complicated, sticky, thorny tangles. We’re not advertising robots. We’re not weaponized brands. We’re people, and we have thoughts and feelings and ideas and fears and gasp opinions on the world and other human beings that exist around us. Because we’re all connected, and social media — often thought of as somehow unreal — is just as real as real life and only deepens the connections we experience. We’re more bound up together, not less. (Though in opposition to this I’d also caution you to not place too much actual importance on social media in terms of selling books — it’ll sell them here and there, but I think we often overstate how much social media from the author specifically can sell books. It does. But much of your audience won’t ever be reading your tweets in the first place.)

Even still — sales (gaining or losing) isn’t a good reason to have an opinion online.

Have an opinion because you’re a person.

And you’re a writer, with your own unique means of expressing your feelings.

Don’t be a brand.

Don’t be so hyper-focused on selling your book that you forget to act like a human being. I don’t pay much attention to those writers who just bark out advertisements for their books day in and day out — I just squeegee their greasy spam tracks from my monitor and move on. I do, however, pay attention to writers who are bold enough to be people — that’s not just about them sharing opinions, but just about how they come across online. More like humans, less like SkyNet.

You are more than your book sales.

Speak up and speak out if you so choose.

Or, put your opinions into the work, instead.

You shouldn’t feel pressured to get loud.

But you also shouldn’t feel pressured to be silent, either.

Having an opinion doesn’t give you any authority, no. But it’s one of the milestones of being human. And being a writer ostensibly gives you a way to put those opinions out in an interesting way.

So, should writers have and share opinions on matters both small and uncontroversial? Absolutely. Engage. Talk. Share. Join up with the human experience. Connect in that way if you so choose. Opinions, as the saying goes, are like assholes: we all have them. And it would be weird for you not to have an opinion just as it would be weird if you did not have a butthole. That’s actually how we test for alien marauders, by the way. We scan them at the TSA to see if they have rectal passages. It’s how we know you’re not human — surely we’ve all been there at TSA when a xeno-terrorist suddenly realizes he’s been butthole-scanned and been found lacking, and then his flesh splits and his gelatinous tentacle-body explodes forth in protest and then –

Okay, I think I’ve lost the thread.

And I probably just lost a couple sales, too.

DAMNIT

I knew I was supposed to pay attention to this series of Post-It notes stuck to my monitor: “STOP TALKING ABOUT THE ALIEN NEGA-BUTTHOLE CONSPIRACY; IT REALLY FREAKS PEOPLE OUT.”

I am such a fool.

*hangs head in shame*

Flash Fiction Challenge: Ten Random Sentences

[Apologies that this challenge is late — I set the other one to post but, without realizing it, had been logged out and the scheduled posting did not save.]

This challenge? Pretty straightforward.

Pick one of these five randomly generated sentences.

Use the sentence in a flash fiction short story, ~1000 words in length.

Post that story at your online space, and give us a link to that story in the comments below — this story is due by this coming Friday the 13th at noon EST.

Bonus challenge: use more than one of these sentences in the story.

The sentences are:

“The mysterious diary records the voice.”

“The stranger officiates the meal.”

“The shooter says goodbye to his love.”

“A glittering gem is not enough.”

“The memory we used to share is no longer coherent.”

“The old apple revels in its authority.”

“Rock music approaches at high velocity.”

“Sixty-Four comes asking for bread.”

“Abstraction is often one floor above you.”

“The river stole the gods.”

Lauren Roy: Five Things I Learned Writing Grave Matters

Night Owls bookstore always keeps a light on and evil creatures out. But, as Lauren M. Roy’s thrilling sequel continues, even its supernatural staff isn’t prepared for the dead to come back to life…

Elly grew up training to kill things that go bump in the night, so she’s still getting used to working alongside them. While she’s learned to trust the eclectic group of vampires, Renfields, and succubi at Night Owls bookstore, her new job guarding Boston’s most powerful vampire has her on edge—especially when she realizes something strange is going on with her employer, something even deadlier than usual…

Cavale isn’t thrilled that his sister works for vampires, but he’s determined to repair their relationship, and that means trusting her choices—until Elly’s job lands all of the Night Owls in deep trouble with a vengeful necromancer. And even their collective paranormal skills might not be enough to keep them from becoming part of the necromancer’s undead army…

***

YOU GUYS LOOK AWFULLY FAMILIAR

When I originally wrote Night Owls, I wasn’t sure there’d be a sequel. I left the story open-ended enough for there to be one, or for it to stand on its own. So when Ace wanted a sequel, I had to revisit a cast of characters who’d been out of my head and off my desk for just about a year.

It was a wee bit terrifying – what if I’d forgotten their voices? What if I’d didn’t have a good story to tell? There came the Impostor Syndrome, right on cue: Everyone’s going to know you’re a terrible writer. A one-trick pony.

That awful little imp never truly goes away, but I learned that – at least when it came to finding the characters – it was wrong. I thought a bit about where everyone would be a month after Night Owls finished. How would they be processing (or avoiding processing) the events of the first book? The walk between the train station and my office turned out to be the perfect length for me to noodle on how different people would interact with one another. I paired ‘em up and watched ‘em go, and it was a bit like meeting up with a bunch of good friends you haven’t seen in a while – after the it’s-been-too-longs, it was like we’d never been apart.

Soon enough, Chaz was dropping f-bombs everywhere, Elly was ready to climb the walls, and I even had a plot.

OUTLINES ARE NOT POISON

Oh my god, you guys, I’m such a pantser.

Okay, not entirely true – I will plot a few chapters ahead, and when I’ve written up to that point, I look where the story’s going and plot a little more. If a scene comes to me out of order, I jot down notes. Even without a solid outline, I generally have an endgame in mind. But the squishy middle? I let it stay squishy.

When I was a wee writer, back in the days where I talked more about writing than actually, y’know, writing, I liked to trot out a quote from Stephen King about how outlines were for bad writers. Sweet zombie Jesus, that was pretentious of me. I can look back on those days and count the projects I actually, y’know, finished on no hands. I was lucky if anything got beyond the first 10,000 words.

So when my editor, the lovely Rebecca Brewer, asked for an outline of what would become Grave Matters, I spent a couple of weeks wibbling. Not because I still adhered to that King quote, but because it’s more planning than I usually do. But hey, your editor asks you for an outline, you give her one. She’s a professional. She knows shit’s going to change. It’s okay.

I put my butt in the chair and got it done. Sometimes my brain made sad whirring, clunking noises when I got stuck on a plot point, but part of the writing process, even for a pantser like me, is figuring out what comes next. I called on my RPG-writing and GMing skills, here. I imagined the characters as PCs, tried to figure out what I would do if I were playing them in someone else’s game. What questions would I ask the GM? How would I apply the knowledge I had gathered? On the flip side, if I were running a game for these characters, what wrenches could I fling into their works? It got me past those sticking points, and I was able to move ‘em along toward the endgame.

Neat things I learned: Writing an outline did not sap my soul. Nor did it kill the fun of writing the story. In fact, it helped me figure out the next two things…

THAT SUBPLOT’S GOTTA GO

In its original form, GRAVE MATTERS had an extra subplot. It wasn’t a terrible subplot. It followed on from things that happened in the first book, and it helped set up more terrible things for me to do the characters down the road. Writers are mean, you guys.

But it was also way too convoluted. George RR Martin I am most decidedly NOT, and in the 90-100,000 word scope of an urban fantasy novel, there simply wasn’t enough wordspace to pull it off – or, at least, not pull it off well.

So I made with the cutting.

I was a bit scared, since it meant mostly cutting the Jackals from the first book out of the second. Part of me insisted they had to be there, doing evil, Jackally things. Yet, when I pulled their threads out of the synopsis, the rest of the plot didn’t unravel. What emerged, in fact, was a better story, one that made more sense. Bonus – my editor didn’t set the revised outline on fire and send it back to me.

MORE VOICES!

It wasn’t all about excision, though. Another thing I learned while outlining was, I had to put something in. Someone, actually. Book one had three point-of-view characters: Val, Elly, and Chaz. That was plenty, thought I. (see “not-GRRM,” above). Those three, I knew, were absolutely coming back for Grave Matters. I had their shenanigans all planned out.

But looking back at my beats of what-needs-to-happen, I realized I had events jotted down that no one in that trinity would be present for. I could, I supposed, have the character who did witness them explain it all after the fact (which put me in danger of Too Much Exposition). OR. Or! I could do that thing I hear writers ought to do and show the audience.

Just a scene, I thought. Just to try it out, see if it works. I had this warlock, you see, Elly’s brother, who’s been through a whole lot of bullshit and hardship in his life. He’d finally started building a life for himself, when suddenly his estranged sister shows up on his doorstep at the start of Night Owls. How’s that working out for him? For both of them?

Turns out, boy did I like writing from Cavale’s POV. You get a little more worldbuilding, access to another facet of Elly’s background, and, as one of my beta readers pointed out, MORE FEELS.

FUCK YEAH BOOKSELLERS

Okay, I’m cheating on this one a bit. I mean, it’s something I already knew, and I’m utterly and completely biased about the subject anyway, but the last year of my authorly life has only reinforced my love for booksellers. I have a folder in my email labeled “Awesome,” and it’s filled with congratulations from the people who work their butts off day in and day out to get books – sometimes my book! – in readers’ hands. Bookstores, and the booksellers who staff them, are essential, important parts of our community. Any new city I visit, you can be damned sure I’m visiting one of its indie stores. Which always makes checking baggage on the flight home a game of how close to the weight limit can I get without going over but… worth it. It’s been a little surreal to stop in at a bookstore I don’t have a personal connection to and see Night Owls on the shelf, or have a friend tweet a picture to me of seeing it out in the wild.

Plus, booksellers get all the bookstore jokes I’ve sprinkled through the series.

(And hey, if you have a favorite local bookstore, maybe give ‘em a shoutout in the comments?)

Lauren M. Roy: Website | Twitter | Tumblr

Grave Matters: Indiebound | B&N | Amazon