Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 147

Flash Fiction Challenge: The SubGenre Blender

Last week’s challenge: Must Contain Three Things.

This week is one of my favorite brands of challenge — the subgenre smash-up.

Your goal is simple: pick one subgenre from each of the two tables below (preferably randomly, using either a die or a random number generator) and then mash those two genres up into a single story.

This time around, let’s say you have 2000 words. Write it at your online space, link back here in the comments so we can all see it. You’ve got one week — due next Friday by noon EST.

Subgenre Table 1

Haunted House
Space Opera
Cryptozoological
Sword & Sorcery
Cozy mystery
Dystopian
Zombie
Espionage
Arthurian Fantasy
Vampire Erotica
Greek Mythology
Kaiju
Utopian
Lovecraftian
Extraterrestrial
Conspiracy Thriller
Steampunk
Dieselpunk
Cornpunk
Urban Fantasy

Subgenre Table 2

Weird Tales
Technothriller
Noir Detective
Biopunk
Heist / Caper!
Slasher / Final Girl
Alternate History
Disaster Porn
Superhero
Eco-Thriller
Bumbling Detective
Wild West
Artificial Intelligence
Comic Fantasy
Psychological Thriller
Regency Romance
Magical Realism
Bodice Ripper
Paranormal Romance
Satanic Horror

S.L. Huang: On The Subject Of Unlikable Women Protagonists

S.L. Huang said she wanted to talk about asshole protagonists, and why they always had to be men. I told her that I am the audience for that post and, I think, so are you guys. As such, here she is to talk about the subject — with a bonus table included! Also, check out her newest — Half-Life, which features high-octane math as a powerful superpower.

* * *

I love asshole protagonists.

Or rather, I love a particular breed of them: protagonists who are brusque and violent, egotistical and snarky, but when the chips are down and the friends they’d never admit they care about are in danger, they’ll break the world to save them. Characters like Tony Stark, Sherlock Holmes, the Doctor, Rodney McKay, Spike, Wolverine, Artemis Fowl, Dean Winchester…

You might notice it’s a lot, lot easier to think of male characters who embody this archetype. And, in contrast to the many sympathetic asshole men who lead their own stories, the awesome ladies who are both jerks and heroes often aren’t the main protagonists: Faith and Anya from Buffy, H.G. Wells from Warehouse 13, Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica, Hermione from Harry Potter. We’ve got a few great leads and co-leads in genre — Maree from Deep Secret, Katniss from The Hunger Games, Miriam Black from Blackbirds, just for example. But for every woman who fits this mold, I can think of many more men: Bones and Body of Proof go up against Monk/Psych/Sherlock/The Mentalist/Endgame/Elementary/House, The Heat is one film outstripped in numbers by every other buddy cop movie ever made, and so on.

In fact, I did some math! Narrowing solely to written fiction for the moment, since that’s what I’m about to talk about, I looked at the “literature” section of a bunch of the TV Tropes pages that match the asshole hero archetype I’m talking about:

Character Trope
Male Examples
Female Examples
Genderqueer Examples
Percentage Female


“Jerk with a Heart of Gold”
63
12
0
12/75 = 16%


“Sociopathic Hero”
16
2
0
2/18 = 10%


“Loveable Rogue”
47
1
0
1/48 = 2%


“Unscrupulous Hero”
8
0
0
0/8 = 0%


“Good Is Not Nice”
58
13
0
13/71 = 18%


Overall Average



THIRTEEN. FUCKING. PERCENT.

Notes: Literature section only, accessed 1/15/2015. I did a search on any name that didn’t have a pronoun attached. And this is not counting who is a lead character and who is supporting — I’m willing to bet that number would go down if we narrowed to only protagonists.

Thirteen. Percent!

Certainly part of the problem is that we don’t have enough women in media, period. After all, only about 30 percent of speaking roles in movies go to women, and I’m not hopeful the written word is eons ahead. But 13 percent is way way way lower than that, and also lower than other, more positive TV Tropes categories, even those we might expect to be gendered — “Minored in Ass Kicking,” for example, is more than 1/3 female.

This disparity in such magnificent assholery disturbs me greatly. It disturbs me enough that when I started writing what would eventually become Zero Sum Game, I purposely made my asshole antihero protagonist a woman, and it disturbs me enough that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it when interacting with other writers since then.

And I have a conjecture.

You see, as I’ve meandered through the depths of the Internet Writer Community, I see one question asked time and again: “How do I write good female characters?” I see people so worried — worried their fictional ladies will come off as bitches or whores or mean girls or ditzes or doormats or damsels or Mary Sues. And I see people carefully constructing their fictional women to be sexy but not slutty, confident but not arrogant, smart but not insufferable, flawed but not too flawed.

Because good representation, amirite?

But this desire to make fictional women somehow unobjectionable can flatten out everything that makes characters the most compelling. After all, stories are not built on unobjectionable people! There’s an excellent essay by Rose Lemberg that makes the point better than I could: I want female characters, particularly main characters, who are allowed not to be good. I don’t mean that just in a moral sense, although yeah, that, too — but I also want women who are bad at things, or just fucking terrible at being human. Women who are not nice. Who fail. Who make disastrous mistakes. Women who are unstoppable in combat but a disgrace at basic human interaction, or women who are fantastic diplomats but can’t hit the broad side of a planet with a weapon.

And yes, I want more women who are assholes.

When we don’t let women live the whole range of fucked-up humanity, we miss out. Just look at the list of male characters I started with at the beginning — every one of them can be a horrible jerk, but every one of them has an intense fanbase of people who love and connect with them. Hell, if you tried to take those characters away, Tumblr would melt the entire internet in rage. And I’m one of those fans! But I want me more lady antiheroes as well — and that can’t happen unless we let female characters be jerks too.

Let’s have more Starbucks and Marees and Olivia Popes. Let’s populate fiction with women who are every type of humanity — assholes and all.

Who’s with me?

S.L. Huang is the author of Zero Sum Game and its sequel Half Life, the first two books in a series starring an asshole female protagonist. You can find her online at www.slhuang.com or on Twitter as @sl_huang.

Doubt’s Foot In Logic’s Door: Thoughts On Anti-Vaxxer Attitude

So, measles, huh?

Let’s just get this out of the way right now: vaccinate your kids. I know, we’re taught to ask questions, we’re taught to be skeptical, we’re American iconoclasts goddamnit and we didn’t get anywhere by getting in line and marching to someone else’s beat and something something patriotism. Except, you’re marching to someone’s beat if you don’t get your kids vaccinated (and more on that in a moment). For now, it’s time to unclench your jaw. It’s time to vaccinate your children. Otherwise, what’s next? Polio? People in my family had that. It’s horrible. I’d rather my kids have autism, which is a thing not at all caused by vaccines anyway.

There.

Now that’s out of the way.

Which brings me to the larger question: how does this happen?

How does the anti-vaxxer attitude gain enough prominence that diseases we have eradicated or at least marginalized begin to surge anew? How does an anti-science parade march down the middle of our city squares and we not only fail to run the parade-leaders out on rails but, instead, give them a podium and a microphone and an ounce of credibility? What the crap is happening? What the hap is crappening? Wuzza wooza fizzy fuzzy muh? Whuh? Buh?!

I started to noodle on it.

Just turning it around and around in my mouth, like a soft glob of food where you suddenly bite into something hard and then have to wonder: “Jesus, what is in my mouth? Eggshell? Piece of glass, plastic, or is it a fingernail? Oh, god, it’s a fingernail.”

As I started looking closer, I started finding empathy.

Not sympathy. The difference is critical. Understanding the problem and the mindset (empathy) is a whole shed-load different from feeling emotional kinship to it (sympathy).

Because, a lot of anti-vaxx people aren’t total scramble-brained moonbats. They can spell. They have college degrees. Contrary to what people think, gasp, they might actually even be liberals. (If you think either party has the lockdown on bad information and fear-mongering, ha ha ha, ohh, you naive stripling, please let me show you the world.) Hell, I’ve been a guy who has spread bad information before — usually with the all-too-easy click of a SHARE THIS UNVERIFIED HORSESHIT link at Facebook. I’ve seen people I consider smarter than me pass around information dumber than a bag of socks.

I wanna know how. I want to crack this nut.

And I think it begins when our trust in certain institutions begins to break down.

Erosion

We are taught to trust. To have faith in systems and structures and disciplines.

One such system is our health care system.

(Please, hold your laughter.)

It’s true, though, right? Even in the snark that’s already building at the back of your throat when I even mention the health care system, we still go to doctors and still go to hospitals because that’s ultimately where our trust lies. They are the experts. They know things we don’t. Even when we say we don’t trust them — we have to trust somebody, and it might as well be them.

But, inevitably, those people will fail you. And they might fail you in a spectacular way. I had an aunt who had leg and hip problems and for months tried to get it diagnosed beyond muscle strain, and eventually, she didn’t have to — because turns out, it was cancer. My mother had a friend who had neck problems and the doctors misdiagnosed too long — turns out, it was a form of meningitis, and she almost died.

We’ve had our own brushes with this. When our son was born, we heard through our crunchy hippie liberal idea chain that birth is often over-managed — it’s pitocin and an epidural and not long until a C-section is on its way, and sure enough, when we get there that was exactly what they wanted to do. It’s like a train you get on and can’t get off. And they push that shit hard. Like drug peddlers. (An epidural, before insurance, can cost anywhere from $1000 – $3000.) Last year, our son was sick — not real sick, not sick in a scary way, just with a cold, but it had lingered a while and so we took him to the doctor just to see what they had to say. Our doctor, who we love, said without hesitation that he needed antibiotics. I said, “Did you test for a bacterial infection?” because it was right at that time we were started to hear about the post-antibiotic age and how doctors overprescribe antibiotics (when I was a kid if you sneezed once, you had a week’s worth of amoxicillin), and he said, “No, it’s just a preventative.” Which is weird, given that few colds are ever treatable by antibiotics. Again, I stress: our son wasn’t problematically sick. He was happy, running around, fever long-gone. We neglected to give him the antibiotics (a scary moment because — hey, the doctor told you one thing, and if you go the other way, oh boy howdy you just fucked up), and two days later he was all good.

It’s enough to give you pause.

Just a moment’s worth — but that’s all it takes.

Because once that mirror is chipped: the whole thing shatters pretty damn easy.

Somewhere along the way, the system is going to disappoint you. Education will fail your child. Your government will launch missiles at a wedding or a school or it will raise your taxes or betray your confidence. Your insurance won’t pay for something you swore was covered: flood, accident, an injury. All of these things are threads, and once you start pulling on them — *whistles* Hoo boy, will your faith be shaken. You hear about some outbreak of food-borne illness and it doesn’t take much to see how the FDA doesn’t have the power you think it should have, how they cannot institute recalls and how recalls are entirely voluntary. And then you think about those studies that say eggs are good for you, and now they’re bad, and now they’re good, and they raise cholesterol, but they don’t raise cholesterol, and how the first thing the doctor asks you when they note your high cholesterol is, HOW MANY EGGS DO YOU EAT followed by CAN WE PUT YOU ON A CHOLESTEROL MED NOW? And you start to see how maybe the eggs-are-good study was paid for by the Sinister Egg Lobby, or how the eggs-are-bad study was paid for by goddamn Lipitor, and then CBS asks you DOES YOUR DOCTOR HAVE TIES TO BIG PHARMA (warning: the devil lurks there as an autoplaying video) and healthimpactnews-dot-com says DOCTORS EARN $3.5 BILLION IN KICKBACKS FROM PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES. And healthimpactnews sounds like a real thing — you like health, you like news, and those things should impact the shit out of each other, so yeah, yes, cool.

And then you click a little deeper into the healthimpactnews site and you find talk of ozone therapy curing ebola (but of course it’s repressed!) and hey look at this vaccine cover-up and did you know application of broccoli sprouts improves autism — and at first some of those things seem woo-woo weird, like, hey, that can’t be right, but then you follow the pulled thread back and you remember, oh right, big business pays for studies and doctors were pushing meds when I didn’t want them to and the government blows up children and OH GODDAMN SHIT I CAN’T TRUST ANYTHING ANYMORE. Soon you learn that healthimpactnews is bullshit, and so you either have to go deeper down the I can’t trust anything rabbit hole or you have to plant a flag and say, this far, no further, I trust in this random asshole website who actually probably doesn’t believe its own lies and is really just selling content and advertising and clicks.

You no longer know what to believe.

Because that thing you just read sounds crazy, but we’re fans of crazy. We like to think we know things that the BIG SYSTEMS and CORPORATE MONSTERS don’t want us to know. And some of it is real! Some of it isn’t horseshit — we see how big companies legitimately abuse people, how banks give wafer-thin mortgages, how a corporation will pollute water that people drink. Corporate and governmental abuse is no myth. It happens. Not all the time, maybe not even all that often, but that doesn’t matter. We’re shit at risk analysis. Driving in a car is a lot worse than riding in a plane, but one plane crash and suddenly we’re like, nope, fuck that, I’m not a bird, I will not violate God’s own laws just to get to Tulsa more quickly. People die endlessly of flu but we get a statistically non-existent blip of ebola in this country and everybody’s shitting out their internal organs hoping they don’t catch the disease that makes them shit out their internal organs. More people are killed by hippos and cows, but fuck you, sharks.  *throws dynamite at sharks*

So, all this adds up, and then you go onto a place like Facebook, where ideas transmit fast. See, once, you wouldn’t read this post — you’d hear me tell it to you at a conference or in an elevator somewhere. And when I told you about my aunt or my Mom’s friend, maybe you’d nod and say, yeah, yeah, that happened to a friend of mine, or a friend or a friend, and we’d take our respective stories — true, false, or statistically improbable — and we’d carry them onto other groups. But we’d do this very, very slowly. Many times the idea would die out. Ideas in this way transmit like viruses or bacteria — they used to be slow, but now, Facebook? Facebook makes transmission of ideas fast. (Hence: “gone viral.”) We share bad information quickly, and we rile each other up about the things we thought were true — our distrust cracks the windshield collectively, now, not just on an individual, singular basis. Even this post that I’m writing? I told you about my experiences, about my aunt, about my mother’s friend — and we take those things in as data points when really they’re just fucking anecdotes with no meaning in the greater scheme. And god, even when you go looking for data, you can find all these correlating points still are open to wild interpretation (remember the ties between Internet Explorer and the murder rate?).

You eventually have to return trust and faith to something, so you start to put it in those people or those sites that you perceive are telling you the truth. People who have not yet betrayed your trust.

(So far as you know. You may see their agendas soon enough.)

And we spread the information.

And we nod and smile and tell each other we know things others don’t.

And we feel good because we found some inherent truth. Some signal amidst noise.

And we append to these things our own agendas, often unrealized.

It’s mostly a lie, of course. The truth is usually out there if you look hard enough. You can find a consensus on most topics — an imperfect consensus, but one that is often better than trusting like, that one guy on that website.

But this is how we get there.

This is how we stop vaccinating our kids.

This is how we disbelieve in climate change.

Or how we start to wonder if Obama really is a Kenyan socialist. Or we share inflated numbers of the dead to support our gun control wishes, or we pass around up other bullshit statistics to counter the efforts of gun control. We eat up mis- and disinformation with a spoon because we need to eat something. Doubt has opened the door, and when that happens, if we’re not careful, a whole lot of bad information can get in through the gap. We don’t always lie to each other knowing they’re lies.

We lie to each other because we’re waystations for other people’s deceptions.

We’re idea conduits. Agenda flingers. Little doubt factories.

So, how do we combat it?

I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t. I think you look for consensus. I think you look at everything with a skeptical eye and try to search out experts. I think you trust known sources of journalism and distrust fringe journalism — but even here, already I can feel my certainty in that eroding because plenty of journalistic sources are really just entertainment cloaked in the thinnest, most diaphanous veneer of “news.” Best bet is to recognize that you know less than you know, and that growing up is about embracing uncertainty rather than proselytizing the gospel truth.

It’s hard. It’s really hard.

And I think that’s what this post is about: just acknowledging that it is hard to get good information, and that distrust is overwhelming and damaging, and that the disruption of the Glorious Internet sometimes means awesome things but it sometimes means really shitfucky information gets transmitted really quickly. Anecdotes become artisanal data very, very fast — often without us realizing it. And before we know it, we’re all giving Jenny McCarthy a microphone, and kids are dying from measles they caught at a goddamn amusement park.

P.S. vaccinate your kids, for Chrissakes.

P.P.S. global warming is totally a thing.

P.P.S.S. Read this book: You Are Not So Smart.

New Release: Atlanta Burns

You don’t mess with Atlanta Burns.

Everyone knows that. And that’s kinda how she likes it—until the day Atlanta is drawn into a battle against two groups of bullies and saves a pair of new, unexpected friends. But actions have consequences, and when another teen turns up dead—by an apparent suicide—Atlanta knows foul play is involved. And worse: she knows it’s her fault.

You go poking rattlesnakes, maybe you get bit.

Afraid of stirring up the snakes further by investigating, Atlanta turns her focus to the killing of a neighborhood dog. All paths lead to a rural dogfighting ring, and once more Atlanta finds herself face-to-face with bullies of the worst sort. Atlanta cannot abide letting bad men do awful things to those who don’t deserve it. So she sets out to unleash her own brand of teenage justice.

“Give Nancy Drew a shotgun and a kick-butt attitude and you get Atlanta Burns.” — Joelle Charbonneau, author of The Testing Trilogy

Hey, look, everybody!

Atlanta Burns is now out.

Check it out at:

Amazon US (Kindle, trade paperback, audio)

Amazon UK (Kindle, trade paperback, audio)

B&N (trade paperback, audio)

Indiebound (trade paperback, audio)

or Add on Goodreads

The Book

Young Adult — crime/noir.

Veronica Mars on Adderall. Nancy Drew meets Justified.

I wrote this book a couple years ago, and published it as two separate volumes — a novella, Shotgun Gravy, and a follow-up novel, Bait Dog. (The latter published with the help of Kickstarter.) It was a foray into young adult and crime writing at the same time, and the result was something with which I was honestly very happy. Atlanta Burns is a character after my own heart: she is a real-deal social justice warrior, an underdog who helps other underdogs — a saint to freaks and geeks, a foe to bullies and racists and other human monsters.

The book did well enough — or was at least intriguing enough — that Skyscape, the publisher of my young adult Heartland cornpunk trilogy, decided to pick up the first volume and a follow-up. (That follow-up is tentatively titled Frack You, and I am writing it now.) The first book is a re-edit of both Shotgun Gravy and Bait Dog, so that the two separate-but-connected stories are bound up as a single narrative volume. For those wanting to ask: that means this text is different from the two earlier self-published releases, substantially enough that this is a new book, but not so substantially that the story has dramatically changed.

It’s a tough book. I don’t know what trigger warnings to give it, so assume it’s got a basket of them. The book deals with suicide, sexual assault, dog fighting, bullying, guns. Yes, it’s young adult, but it’s got a lot of violence and more than its share of nasty words (though, honestly, probably nowhere near as nasty as what you hear out of most kids’ mouths). But despite all the Pennsyltucky grit, I like to think it’s funny and it has heart, too.

Some books you write and publish are books you like and you want people to read. (Some you hate and just want to bury.) But as an author — at least for me — some books end up as more than that. They’re more than just, HEY, I HOPE YOU CHECK IT OUT AND LIKE IT. Some books are your weird little book-babies. You love them more than you maybe should. You care more than is reasonable. Atlanta Burns falls into that category for me — as a character, she means a lot to me, and the book has been an underdog, like her, all along.

And So, A Plea

This book is published by Skyscape.

And Skyscape is an imprint under Amazon Publishing.

They have been aces about this book. Excellent editorial work. I adore the cover (which is by Cyanotype Book Architects). They’ve given this book a great deal of love. I have not a bad word to say about my experiences publishing with them.

But! Here is the reality check: this is a young adult book and young adult books do well in print because teens, apparently, like physical books more than they do e-books. Further, Amazon being Amazon means this book is not going to make it into a lot of bookstores easily. Some stores will carry it — a wonderful local children’s/YA store nearby, Let’s Play Books, carries the book (and if you want signed copies, I’d say to contact them). This would be less of an issue if my book were SFF, where digital reading is more prominent. But with YA, the physical book really matters. (I’ve actually been “banned” from the shelves of one prominent children’s store because of publishing with Amazon, actually — this isn’t the norm, as most stores are good or at least polite about it.)

Libraries matter. Bookstores matter. Schools matter.

What that means, practically speaking, is that this book is a little bit hobbled out of the gate.

And that means, I could use your help.

Er, obviously, I hope you buy the book and check it out — but beyond that, a book lives or dies on its word of mouth and this one? I think it could use the word of mouth.

I need your help spreading the word.

What does that mean, exactly? Well, it means whatever signal boost you can give it, I’ll take it with great gratitude. A word on social media. A review. A call to your local bookstore, library, school, whoever, whatever, wherever. Climb a tree and yell it at some squirrels? I dunno. Bottom line is: tell somebody, if you can. Especially if you like it! If you like a book, the best gift you can give the author (besides like, a bag of good coffee or the keys to a new Maserati) is attention — word of mouth is where writers and our stories live or die.

So, if you dig this website, if you like my other work?

Check this one out, and maybe boost the signal.

Thanks!

Reviews

Bookworm Blues, Sarah Chorn:

“Wendig breaks down boundaries and challenges his readers, and that’s part of what is so addicting about his books. Atlanta Burns is a no holds barred train ride through Hell and Wendig is an incredibly talented engineer.”

Michael Patrick Hicks:

“With Atlanta Burns, Chuck Wendig lobs one helluva hand grenade into the middle of the Young Adult genre… Temporarily trading in the far-future cornpunk pastures of his Heartland series for the redneck noir of Pennsyltucky, Wendig fully delivers with this terrific thriller. It’s stocked to the gills with white supremacists, dogfighting rings, drugs, murder, and mayhem. It also has plenty of heart in between, and the titular heroine, Atlanta Burns, is wildly worth rooting for. If you’ve followed Wendig’s other heroine, Miriam Black (Blackbirds), Burns may feel familiar and has a similar world-toughened outer shell and a mouthful of razor-sharp sarcasm.”

Tangled Bookmarks:

“The feels. OMG the FEELS! Seriously, a Chuck Wendig book breaks your heart into a gazillion million pieces and then holds the superglue just out of reach, saying na-nah-naaa-nah! Also? The best characters EVER in the history of fiction. I am so in love with Atlanta Burns that she has surpassed HitGirl as my all time hero.”

Melanie Meadors:

“Wendig has accomplished something pretty cool with this novel. Not only does he deal with topics like suicide, homosexuality, bullying, dog fighting/animal rights, absentee parenting, sexual abuse, and drugs—he deals with them all in one book in a realistic way that doesn’t feel heavy-handed. We don’t get that syndrome I see so often in teen books, where so many things happen to one person that it’s unbelievable. Most importantly, however, he captures the helpless, powerless feeling of being a teen so well, and in a way adults can understand, which is possibly the most interesting thing. Atlanta’s problems are not petty, and they are far-reaching. I never felt the eye-rolling exasperation I get when I read some YA “issues” books, I never felt like the main character had to get over herself, because she wasn’t in it for herself. She puts her life on the line for her friends, and while yes, life would have been easier had she just lain low and let things happen…well, this is Atlanta Burns we’re talking about here.”

Adan Ramie:

“Atlanta is my new hero. She’s not stupid, and she knows what she’s doing is dangerous, but what drives her is a need to right wrongs and put an end to the injustice that runs so rampant in her small town. I can definitely relate to the sentiment.”

Bookie-Monster.com:

“Girl Detectives. You know them: Nancy Drew, Ginny Gordon, Trixie Belden, and so many others. Atlanta Burns is the newest name on that list. The difference in this series is that author Chuck Wendig takes that beloved trope and drags it out behind the dumpsters of its safe little world. He roughs it up and hauls it onto a stage set by the mundane horrors of poverty, racism, and abuse.”

Pamela @ Goodreads:

“First of all, Wendig, get on that sequel because I need more Atlanta Burns in my life. Please and thank you…. Watch out for the ending, because the story will tear out your heart and stomp on it like a bee-stung elephant before allowing you to gently pick up the pieces and place it back in your chest, where it will start pounding in anticipation of Atlanta Burns’ next outing.”

Steven @ Goodreads:

“The titular main character, Atlanta Burns, is a FRIGGIN’ BADASS. I can tell you right now, on January 8th, that she is going to be one of my top favorite characters of 2015. She’s rough around the edges, has been through hell and back, and has decided that, with all the corruption and evil around her and adults who won’t do anything about it, she is going to take a stand against the darkness.”

Sunil @ Goodreads:

“I don’t know how many times I can praise Wendig’s prose, but the man is a fucking master of the third-person present noir style. The words feel supercharged with energy and creative metaphor… By the end, you’ll be ready for Atlanta Burns to take on all the bullies of the world and show them who’s boss (spoilers, it’s her).”

52 Book Minimum:

“Good gravy is she fantastic! It’s January 7th and I can GUAR.AN.DAMN.TEE that Atlanta will go down as one of my Top 10 main characters for all of 2015.”

Sci-Fi Bulletin:

“Chuck Wendig’s latest novel, originally self-published under the title Bait Dog (in case you’re thinking both the description and this review sound familiar!) is as much of a horror tale as his Double Deadvampire tales for Abbadon or his Miriam Black stories; it just doesn’t have the supernatural element that those two are based around. Atlanta doesn’t have super powers; she doesn’t know when you’re going to die. The only person whose death she has a pretty keen idea about is her own – and it’s likely to come quite soon if she continues the way she is going.”

On The Subject Of Awards

I’ve wanted to be a writer since –

*checks watch*

– since I karate kicked my way out of the dragon cloaca that birthed me. I’m pretty sure I come from a dragon? That’s what my mother told me. MY MOTHER, WHO IS A DRAGON. (Actually, for real, if you see my mother’s feet? You might be inclined to agree. I’m pretty sure that she could scalp a man by gripping it with her foot and just twisting.)

I had a momentary desire to be a cartoonist, but for the most part, it was writer, writer, writer.

Which means I started writing very early. I’m still one of those dips who keeps the “books” he published when he was in elementary school. (The earliest I have is a story about who go to the core of the earth to save it. A story that later became the Delroy Lindo filmic masterpiece, The Core. Okay, maybe not. But seriously, it was kinda the same plot.) I had a piece of software for my Tandy 1000 SX called Print Master (or was it Print Shop?) and I’d make book covers and typeset my own books and they were terrible, though probably no more terrible than some of what you find on Amazon Kindle these days (ba-dum-bum). I continued this habit of writing lots and lots of things through elementary school, high school, and college.

My first published short story was when I was 18. I published — professionally, though for very little actual money — a few times throughout college.

Thing is, all throughout this journey, I encountered awards. They offer writing awards throughout the various school-based strata, and when I say I “encountered” them, I mean to suggest I got close enough to smell them, but never near enough to hold onto one. I met these awards on the road, like you might meet a hobo or a vampire. Purely in passing.

Other people always won the awards.

And for a long time, that bothered me. I was young and I thought, awards are validation. Doubly important at that time because I was struggling to convince my family and the rest of the real world that writing was in fact A Real Thing, not just some artsy-poopsy dalliance. I figured, whoa, hey, if I can win an award, that will be irrefutable proof that I’m supposed to do what I’m supposed to do. It’ll prove it to me and it’ll prove it to everyone else.

I didn’t win any.

I sometimes won runner-up.

The winners were always very literary — sometimes amazing work, sometimes confounding and pretentious. The winners were never genre-based. You didn’t see any fantasy, horror, or sci-fi winning — and those were the things I wrote. I even tried to write a few literary-style stories at one point. Which was a good exercise, in that it let me stretch my muscles and extend my voice and also decide very plainly that, no, I don’t want to write purely literary work.

One of the stories I wrote won runner-up in a college writing award.

Ironically, that after I’d already been published. Published for real. And yet, the publication felt somehow less important than winning the award — validation from peers and academics rather than from the market.

That was, and remains, poopy-cuckoo shitty-pants shenanigans.

Awards are not validation. Awards don’t mean something is good or that other things are bad. Awards are accolades and kudos pinned to the sleeves and lapels of art, but their margins are very narrow, the window is very small. That’s not a failing, it’s not a bug — by their nature you can’t take a MASSIVE BULK of art and give out awards to all of them. You have to winnow. You have to whittle. Sometimes that winnowing and whittling feels right. Sometimes it’s driven by social trends, crowd interest, sales, politics, visibility. Sometimes it’s the result of toxic trends, sometimes it’s the result of overturning those toxic trends. Sometimes its great art that wins awards. Sometimes it’s not. (I will remind you that Forrest Gump is an Oscar-winning picture. THAT’S RIGHT, I JUST BURNED YOU, TOM HANKS. I GOT YOU GOOD.)

I say all this because right now, it’s coming up on awards season. That’s true in TV and film, and it’s also true in books — you’re starting to see a lot of chatter about Stokers, Edgars, Hugos, Nebulas. (That will be the protagonist of my next novel: STOKER EDGAR HUGO NEBULA, THE THIRD. An astronaut dragon-riding detective! It’ll win awards!) The chatter rises, and in that chatter I get a sense of award-oriented anxiety — who will win, who should, will I be nominated, I’ll never be nominated, and so on and so forth.

You need to understand, though:

Awards are not infallible.

The best book will not always win an award.

The best book sometimes won’t ever even be nominated.

Sometimes, it will be nominated, and it will win, and you’ll cheer — at the same time someone else boos that very same decision. The book you love isn’t a book everyone loves. And vice versa.

Awards are subjective, strange, and imperfect.

They’re not the whole elephant; they’re just a blood sample.

And at the same time: awards are awesome. The people who win them? Awesome for them. And deserved. Those who are nominated but lose? Awesome for them, too. And also deserved. Those who are never nominated? Hey, fuck it — awesome for you, because you’re out there writing books and reaching an audience and doing what you fucking love to do. You didn’t win an award? Most people didn’t. A hundred other amazing authors and books and pieces of art failed to win awards. Most failed to even score nominations. You’re in good company.

Awards generate interest, conversation, controversy — they’re bubbles in the boiling pot of water. Not always relevant to your world, not always ideal, but it keeps the whole thing cooking.

So, we should celebrate awards and those who win them.

And, at the same time, we should be able to celebrate not winning them. Because awards? Not the end all be all. They’re one part — an admittedly small part — of the total equation. My advice? Relax. Write the stories you want to write. Try to reach an audience, not an award. Awards are too weird, too unpredictable. You win one? Victory lap. You don’t? Then you still get your victory lap.

Just remember that an award doesn’t validate you.

You were valid when you got here. You already have the cake — an award is just icing.

Myke Cole: Nothing New Under The Sun

Man, that post title makes it sounds like I don’t think a whole helluva lot of Myke Cole, doesn’t it? That would be utter horseshit. Major shenanigans. I love Myke. Myke’s a stand-up guy, tough as nails but nice as cookies, and a helluva author, to boot. He’s living it, he’s doing it, he’s working his ass off, and so here he is to talk a little bit of shop — this time, about originality in fiction. (Er, and Myke named the post, damnit. Quit lookin’ at me.)

* * *

My novel Gemini Cell comes out on January 27th [hint: that’s tomorrow — c.], and I wanted to come on Terribleminds to tell you that it’s absolutely unoriginal.

And that’s just fine.

If you work in any artistic discipline, you’ve had this experience: You have a great idea. Not normal-great, but GREAT-great. A thumbnail for a painting that will supplant the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. A novel plot that will make George R. R. Martin throw in the towel. We’re talking scintillating. Game changing. True genius.

And then you go to do your due diligence on the Internet, and find that it’s already been done. Not something vaguely similar. The same damn thing in every last, damnable, niggling, particular detail.

Yes, folks, it’s true, absolutely EVERYTHING has been done before. Professional artists have been burned too many times, we KNOW this. We don’t even bother trying to come up with new ideas.

And that’s okay. Because there’s another great thing happening, it’s called time. Time works hand-in-hand with the incredibly short memory and attention span of the average fan. People FORGET, and they forget quickly. Culture is organic, an ever-evolving phenomenon whose only constant is change. What does this mean? That if you wait long enough, and often not very long at all, enough time will pass, and trends will change enough that your stale idea will suddenly seem original again.

Let’s look at comics for an example. Up until the 80’s, comics were all wrapped up in a set of standards promulgated by a group known as the Comics Code Authority (CCA). Now, I’m not going to get into a history of the CCA, but suffice to say that it existed to protect all the innocent children (and adults) reading comics from stuff they already knew about anyway. Things like, you know, violence and gore, masturbation and boobies. To sum up, the CCA existed to make comic books suck.

And suck they did, from the CCA’s founding in 1954, up until the mid-80’s, when time and changing attitudes forced them to relax their standards (publishers finally abandoned the CCA in the 2000’s, but it was defanged long before that).

Now here’s the thing: you would think that there’d be some grand gesture marking the departure from the shadows of censorship and dancing into the light of depictions of dicks and severed heads and dropping the occasional F-bomb. Batman would be replaced with Buttman. Spidey would web sling his way onto a porn set in the middle of filming. Everything would change.

But that’s not what happened, and that’s okay. Because what happened was way better.

Art is in the details, in the nuance, not the grand gesture. In 1986, Frank Miller brought us Dark Knight Returns, the same Batman we knew and loved from the CCA days, but with a darker cast, updated for an audience ready to be confronted with life’s unrelenting demands on all of us, superhuman or otherwise. A few years earlier, Alan Moore had updated Swamp Thing from his neutered 70’s origins, making him a creature at once dedicated to and utterly cut off from humanity. Neil Gaiman took Wesley Dodds out of his 30’s fedora and gasmask, and made him the deathless master of dream who was as relentless and uncompromising as a hurricane, condemning people, races and worlds to destruction on a whim or at the direction of protocols only he fully understood.

None of this was new. Miller, Moore and Gaiman revived and refreshed characters they hadn’t invented. They took an old thing and played with it, just a little. Just enough.

Anyone who loves comics knows that in all three cases, the result was nothing less than revolutionary.

Zombie stories are popular enough now to constitute their own subgenre. Like most folks of my generation, I grew up on Romero flicks, the slow, dumb zombies in Night of the Living Dead, and their faster counterparts in Dawn of the Dead (the ’04 remake). I sucked down all the Honestly-These-Aren’t-Zombies-Okay-Maybe-They-Are films like 28 Days Later, Resident Evil and I am Legend (both the Vincent Price and Will Smith variants). I started reading Kirkman’s Walking Dead comics in ’03, and stuck with him when the TV series on HBO became stratospherically popular. I’ve downloaded my fair share of mobile-device zombie shoot-em-up games, which are ubiquitous on both the Apple and Android online stores. The Last of Us, which postulates fungal infection as a means of transmission, was such a good console game that I actually watched a two-hour walkthrough on YouTube like it was a feature film.

The zombie genre has been done to death. Romero has been working in the field since 1968. Kirkman has been making “zombie” a household word for over a decade now. Zombies are dead, they eat the flesh of the living. They can be slow or they can be fast. It can be a virus or it can be a bacteria. They can be easily contained or they can bring about an apocalypse. There isn’t a lot left to explore.

Except there is. And writers are doing it. Diana Rowland’s White Trash Zombie series has been well-received (won an RT Reviewer’s Choice award for best Urban Fantasy Protagonist – and that protagonist was a zombie), with the 4th novel hitting stores this past July. Rowland is asking the question, “how does a zombie get on with life after . . . you know, not being alive?” and it’s clearly resonating with readers. Mike Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts, is one of the most celebrated genre novels in memory, drawing intense praise from Slate, the Guardian and Entertainment Weekly. Carey’s book is a bildungsroman for a 10-year old girl growing up in the post-apocalyptic wreckage. Like Rowland’s Ashley Crawford, she is infected, and coping with what it means to grow up when your life is already cut short.

Make no mistake, these are zombie novels. There is nothing grandly bright or new here. It’s just the lightest touch on an old, familiar standby, and it makes all the difference in the world.

Gemini Cell’s protagonist is a U.S. Navy SEAL who is killed when an op goes south. Raised from the dead, he must share his own corpse with a demon and return to the service of his country. But our hero has more on his mind than his job, he left a wife and son behind, and won’t rest until he’s learned their fate.

Gemini Cell is a zombie-novel, but it’s doing other things as well. Schweitzer’s death and reanimation is a bald stand-in for PTSD, and how it cuts those who go to war off from the rest of society, as surely as if they were dead walking among the living. He’s a zombie with a family, and his status as walking-corpse hasn’t changed his love for them, or his desire to continue on as a husband and father. It’s a light touch, to be sure. That’s by design.

If I did it right, it will play like Miller, or Moore, or Gaiman. Readers will feel rooted in the old trope, but spun in a new direction different enough to make them feel that sense of resonance and wonder that brings us to speculative fiction in the first place. If I did it wrong, it’ll be tired, or incoherent, or both.

But either way, Gemni Cell is nothing new. And that’s just fine with me.

* * *

As a secu­rity con­tractor, gov­ern­ment civilian and mil­i­tary officer, Myke Cole’s career has run the gamut from Coun­tert­er­rorism to Cyber War­fare to Fed­eral Law Enforce­ment. He’s done three tours in Iraq and was recalled to serve during the Deep­water Horizon oil spill.  All that con­flict can wear a guy out. Thank good­ness for fan­tasy novels, comic books, late night games of Dun­geons and Dragons and lots of angst fueled writing.

Myke Cole: Website | Twitter

Gemini Cell: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound

Flash Fiction Challenge: Must Contain Three Things

Last week’s challenge: It’s X Meets Y!

This week is easy enough:

Roll randomly on the three tables below, and you will select three things that must be contained within your story. A story that will be 1000 words long, posted at your online space, and linked back here by next Friday, noon, EST.

That’s it. Easy.

Use a die or a random number generator for the tables.

Now, get to writing!

Table 1

A spider
A pocketwatch
Betrayal
A murder
A journal
Poison
A strange bird
A talisman
A library
A sword

Table 2

An assassin
A lost comic book
A found dog
True love
The end of the world
Survival
A divorce
A shopping mall
Public drunkenness
A vampire

Table 3

War
A magician
A bomb
A horse
Resurrection
A cave
A forbidden tryst
A gateway
A shoebox full of photographs
A prison

Atlanta Burns: Goodreads Giveaway

Hey, look! A Goodreads giveaway for 20 print copies of Atlanta Burns.

(US only, I’m afraid.)

The book comes out next week, and certainly you can pre-order the book before it hits shelves, but in the meantime, hey, who doesn’t like the chance to win free books? FIRST YOU MUST DO THE FREE BOOK DANCE.

Okay, there’s no dance. Relax.

Anyway, check it out. I’ll be back next week to talk more about the book proper (and today I just started writing the sequel, tentatively titled, Frack You).

Atlanta Burns, out 1/27:

You don’t mess with Atlanta Burns.

Everyone knows that. And that’s kinda how she likes it—until the day Atlanta is drawn into a battle against two groups of bullies and saves a pair of new, unexpected friends. But actions have consequences, and when another teen turns up dead—by an apparent suicide—Atlanta knows foul play is involved. And worse: she knows it’s her fault. You go poking rattlesnakes, maybe you get bit.

Afraid of stirring up the snakes further by investigating, Atlanta turns her focus to the killing of a neighborhood dog. All paths lead to a rural dogfighting ring, and once more Atlanta finds herself face-to-face with bullies of the worst sort. Atlanta cannot abide letting bad men do awful things to those who don’t deserve it. So she sets out to unleash her own brand of teenage justice.

Will Atlanta triumph? Or is fighting back just asking for a face full of bad news?

Arting Hard Like An Artful Motherfucker: 25 Ways To Be A Bad-Ass Maker Who Makes Bad-Ass Stuff

Last week, here at ye olde bloggy grotto, Delilah S. Dawson came in and rocked your faces with 25 Writing Hacks From A Hack Writer. It’s an amazing (and epic) post — before the new year started, I was working on this post, below, kind of a ranty, yelly, gesticulating mess of a screed about HOW TO ART HARDER, and looking at it now, I think (hope?) it serves as a complement to Delilah’s hai-karate dose of practical writing wisdom.

It will feature a lot of inappropriate metaphors and crass vulgarity, to which someone out there will inevitably say: “You could say it without using so much nasty language, you know.”

I do know.

But that leads me to the first item on the list:

1. Repeat After Me: “Fuck It, I’m Doing It Anyway”

Throughout your MYSTERIOUS AND WONDERFUL AND OCCASIONALLY MISERABLE ART JOURNEY, you will meet many naysayers, and you will be given enough advice that, if you wrote all this advice upon many pieces of paper, you would singularly destroy a significant portion of the world’s forests. You can always keep your ears open. You can always take in every piece of advice, every warning, every admonishment, and you can regard it the way one regards a strange animal skull in the woods (“Was this a possum? A cat? A Bandersnatch?”). But when you know what you want to do, do it anyway. Even if it seems unwise. Someone will always tell you that art is a bad idea. They will tell you that book you want to write won’t sell. They will explain to you how you’d be a far better lawyer, doctor, barista, horse whisperer, or orgy custodian. They will say: “You shouldn’t do that.” And you will say: “Fuck it, I’m doing it anyway.”

2. Stop Giving So Much Of A Shit

Said it before, will say it again: you have to learn to care less. When all the pressures and stresses and anxieties and critics and haters and assfaces and shitbirds come knocking at your door looking to carve away their pound of mental flesh, you have to get out your purse, poke through it while making hmm and ahhh sounds, and then finally say: “Gosh, I’m sorry, I have no more fucks to give.” Then you pull out your cool 1980s-action-movie submachine gun and mow them all down. (Er, metaphorically! No actually shooting anyone.) The hills should be alive with the sound of you not giving two rat pubes to rub together. If we put too much pressure on ourselves, too much weight of expectation and consequence, then the creation of cool things becomes harder. If you build a mental wall, you have to climb it. That’s just extra work. So? Stop putting it between you and the things you want to make.

3. Make Stuff All The Fucking Time

What are you doing right now? Reading this? Get out of here. Go on! Shoo! Fuck off for five minutes and go create. Make something. Then fix it. Then destroy it. Then recreate it. No, no, I’m not saying you literally have to take every minute of every day to be furiously and frantically shitting out content — I just mean, look at yesterday, look at today, look at tomorrow and make sure that those days feature a whole fucking lot of doing art. You wanna be an artist? Artists work their nipples off. Seriously. No artist even has nipples — they’re just sanded off by the sheer waves of creation that buffet them. Rhat might not be true. But the point remains: you wanna create stuff, you gotta do a lot of it. You should be doing it more often than not doing it.

4. Stop Fetishizing The Future

One day, a hypothetical person says, I’m going to do the thing. Solve for X, and that ‘thing’ becomes — well, who knows? Travel the world. Quit your job. Rub your naked butt on the window at the Burger King where you used to work. But often, this is true of artists, writers, makers, creators. We say, one day, I’m going to write that book. Or paint that painting. Or learn how to draw comics or write poetry or sculpt a statue of you rubbing your naked butt on the window at the Burger King where you used to work. But one day will never come. Because the future is always the future. The future is always tomorrow, the next day, the next year — forever out of reach of your grabby hands. Stop praising the future for its opportunity and start seizing the power of the present. Fuck “one day.” You have this day. Do not squander it.

5. Carve Out Time — And Protect That Time

Art requires your time. It is demanding. When Malcolm Gladwell says you need 10,000 hours to learn to do a thing, it’s an arbitrary number, but the truth is there: you need time. And you need time beyond those 10,000 hours because once you figure out how to do what you’re doing you realize you haven’t really figured fuck-all and the only way out is through. You must carve out and claim time and secure these minutes and hours to make stuff. And you must protect this time with tooth and claw. Anybody comes and tries to take your time away — they get shanked with a letter opener. If this thing is a priority to you, then that means you must actively seize the time to do it and ensure that other things get in line behind it, not ahead.

6. Steal Space — And Guard That Space

Artists require territory. Whether it’s a kitchen table with a laptop on it, a walk-in closet where you keep your easel, or a muddy pit in the middle of your yard where you hide from the daystar in order to write poetry on stones with your own filth, you need space to do it. The artist puts up fences and says, THIS IS MINE. Put up metaphorical barbed wire. Guard it like a starveling wolf. I am fortunate enough now to have a writing shed, but I didn’t always — just the same, I always made sure I had space to sit down and do the work. That means a door that closes, or maybe it means noise-canceling headphones. Look at it this way: you can’t grow a garden without some dirt for planting. You’re growing a garden, so find a fucking patch of dirt and get to digging.

7. Spend Your IEP Wisely

If ART were an RPG, every character would have IEP: Intellectual Energy Points. We don’t all get the same number, but we all get some, and we spend them throughout the day. We spend them on important stuff (day job, conversations with loved ones, ninja school). We spend them on… ennh, less important stuff (social media arguments, finding new porn, yelling at clouds). Thing is, the generative act of creating art and shaping it takes IEP. It costs us. So, if you have too few (or none) to give, then your art is a wilting flower, a sad trombone, a melting snowman. This means, again, giving priority. Do the work first. Make stuff as early as you can. Though, here’s a min/maxing tip: in the ART RPG, your character can take a magic potion to regain IEP temporarily. This magic potion is called “coffee.” (Also worth reading: the spoon theory.)

8. Say Yes All The Time…

When you begin the path of ARTING HARD LIKE AN ARTFUL MOTHERFUCKER, you should learn to say yes with an almost automatic, thoughtless grace. I said yes to pretty much everything early on because, at that fumbling stage, being an artist of any kind is hard. You just wanna make stuff and you don’t know how or who will let you or who will pay you and so when someone is like, “I need you to write 1000 words about a goat fucking a pumpkin and I need it by 9AM Tuesday!” you’re like, yeah, yes, yes, just give me the work. Saying yes a lot early on allows you to rove and roam haphazardly toward the eventual goal of being your own self-sufficient maker-person, and at this stage you need to build the ladder out of any spare junk you can find.

9. …Until You Have To Say No All The Time

Eventually, though, you hit a point where you’ve made this crooked ladder out of whalebones and Russian dictionaries and frozen, goat-fucked pumpkins and then… you know, you need to stop doing all that crazy stuff. You need to stop saying yes and you need to start saying no. This is a hard transition — you don’t always know when it is and even when you’re not a desperate artist you remember being desperate. It’s like how my Depression-era grandmother would always steal things from restaurants: salt packets, napkins, every piece of bread she could pilfer, children from neighboring tables. It’s like, it wasn’t the Depression anymore, but she remembered it well, too well, so well that she was ready with every jelly tub or stolen fork. But beginning as an artist is like figuring out sex. You just kinda want to do it everywhere. Eventually, though: you settle down. You focus up. You start saying no more than you say yes.

10. Burn Your Parachute (But Know When To Jump)

I fucked my own exit strategy. I gave myself no meaningful way out. I said, I’m either going to be a writer, or I’m going to toil in obscurity and write anyway. I never gave myself a doorway out of the work that I wanted to do. I wanted to write, so I was always going to be a writer, and nothing was going to change that. Stubborn as a Viagra erection. I burned my own parachute — but at the same time, I knew (or tried to know) when to jump. I didn’t just disengage from all day jobbery and rip off all my clothes and leap into the shrieking maelstrom. I stayed in the plane for as long as I could. I practiced and made stuff and did the work and then, only then, did I figure out how to jump out of the plane without a parachute and, oh, not die. Which leads me to:

11. Be Hungry For Work, Not For, Y’know, Food

The idea of the starving artist is an idea propagated by those who want you to make things for them for free. It’s a real-life trope, an idea that there’s something romantic and precious about starving for your art. It’s framed as a sacrifice: if you care enough about your art, you’ll do it anyway. It’s not about money, they say. It’s about the art. (As if those two things are somehow in opposition — which, uhh, they ain’t.) Well, don’t you love what you do enough to die for it? Aren’t you a soldier fighting in the trenches, in the mud and the blood, for your work? Sure you are. And soldiers still get paid, goddamnit. Soldiers still get three hots and a cot. Don’t go hungry for your art. We don’t make good art when we’re hungry for actual food — we make good art when we’re fed and when we can focus on the work more than we can focus on not dying. Have a dayjob for as long as you can. And when it’s time to marry those two old friends ART and COMMERCE, well –

12. Get Goddamn Fucking Paid Because Art Has Goddamn Fucking Value

Goddamnit. GODDAMNIT. Get paid, artmonkey. Put the thing you made on the table and be like, “I want money for it.” Not Twitter followers. Not a high-five. Not angel farts and chocolate coins. Actual filthy lucre. Yeah, yes, you can make art without getting paid (and more on that in a moment) — but art is not just a hobby and a habit. For many, it’s a career. That’s respectable. That’s not nothing. But the reason so many people look down on a creative career as a choice is that for so long, people in power have told you that art has only ephemeral, creative value. Oh, you do it because you love it, not for this gross money, yuck, ew — gosh, if you take money for your art, you’ve compromised, you’ve sold out, you’ve basically poisoned your own water glass. Commerce makes art impure, they’ll say. And to that, I say, SHENANIGANS. That is CLOWNPANTS. That is a FOUL TREBUCHET FLINGING SCORCHED DIAPERS OVER OUR CITY WALLS. The real tragedy is when artists start to get sucked into this lie — and soon they tell themselves and worse, other artists, that getting paid is somehow dirty pool. It’s not. Stop buying the lie. Stop spreading the myth. Art has value, so claim value for your art.

13. (But If You’re Gonna Be Exposed, Expose Yourself)

Yes, you can ART FOR FREE. Yes, you should art for free. But here’s a tip: when you do it, do it because you want to. Control it. Expose yourself, like I do at JC Penney’s every Tuesday. WAIT, no, I mean — uhh. Never mind. What I’m saying is: control your work. If you put it out there for free, let it be for a real reason, a measurable reason. Again, you’ll find lots of people promising you lots of things if you just make something for them for free. If they’re earning out? You should earn out. If they’re a friend, or if it’s for charity — or better yet, it’s part of an avenue or platform you actually control, then hey, let it all hang out. Not everything is about the money. Sometimes it is about the love. But when someone asks you to create something just for the exposure, well, remember — you can die from exposure LIKE THIS GUY WHO WAS PROBABLY A WRITER:

14. Love Your Bad Reviews

Listen. Listen. You’re an artist, an author, a maker-of-stuffs, and you get a bad review and your first impulse is to fire up the old ragemachine and respond very crankily to said reviewer about how they’re wrong and they don’t get it and huff-a-puff-a-poopy-doo. No, no, no, no, no. Embrace the bad reviews. Enjoy the criticism. Here’s why: they are an indicator of your reach. They are a whittling down of your audience. Your audience will not be Everyone On Earth, awesome as that might be. Some people will love your work. Some people will hate it. I’ve had bad reviews where I wanted to like, literally bite my computer, grr, chomp-chomp. But then I read some of the comments at the bottom of those reviews. Sure, some of the comments were extra-mean with a dollop of scalding snark-sauce, but I also saw comments that said, “You know, that actually sounds like a book I want to read.” Bad reviews are awesome. Good reviews are even awesomer, sure, but hey, it’s all part of the game. Just be happy you’re out there, doing what you do, gathering the battle scars that prove you’ve been in the arena. (Extra credit: Five Ways To Respond To Negative Reviews: A Helpful Guide!)

15. Laugh When You Fall Down

You’re going to fuck up. Your career will have peaks and valleys. Your art will sometimes be shit, sometimes be gold, and you won’t always know the difference. Throughout this ARTFUL LIFE, you will fall down and skin your knee and bust your lip. Laugh it off. Enjoy the failure. Learn from it. Sometimes you fall down, you get to see a new perspective — in the gutter, looking up at the stars. Or maybe there’s two ladybugs down there making sweet ladybug love. That’s nice. That’s real nice. You gotta fall. You gotta take the hits. You have to learn to enjoy it. A creative life is a little bit BDSM. Learn to love the sting of the whip.

16. Finish, But Never Be Finished

Finish your shit. But never be finished. A first draft needs a second draft. Any effort needs a second, and a third, and as many as it takes — and sometimes you scrap one thing to make another thing, and sometimes one thing is a success but what about the next, and the next, and the next after that? There never is a last. A hard-arting motherfucker doesn’t think about one thing. It’s about all the things. It’s not singular. It’s not even just a career. It’s a life. A whole life of creating and fixing and destroying and creating anew. It’s a cosmic cycle. One thing down: an eternity to go. That shouldn’t be scary. That shouldn’t be stressful. That should feel amazing. It never ends until your heart quits kicking and the grave makes its call.

17. Life Is Both Medium And Material

Art is not reiterative. It doesn’t feed itself in the same way you can’t just barf up food and eat it again (though my dog believes differently). Yes, you can fuel part of your ART-TASTIC ODYSSEY through creating things and looking at that which is made by others, but art also requires a life. It demands escape. The hobbit must leave his cozy little berm and go have a crazy adventure before he comes home to write. There must be a there before there’s a back again. A life must be lived. The hobbit has to go and run from dragons and drink with dwarves and get high on wizard drugs before streaking through Mordor (“One does not simply run naked through Mordor”). Life is fuel for what you make because art is a reflection of life. Even when it’s fantastic, impossible, insane — the art we make must still be grounded in the life we live.

18. Complacency Is The Mind-Killer

It’s always sad to see complacency settle into an artist and that artist’s creations — a samey-samey feeling, a smug feeling of comfort, a settled sense of easing back into the chair and doing it all over again. Nothing new. Everything old. Habit, pattern, a hamster in a wheel, a dog eating its own barf. Never be complacent. Look for ruts. Try to figure out when you’re in one.

19. Always Be Reaching

You get out of ruts by reaching. By aiming beyond your talent. This happens right at the beginning — when we first seek to create a thing, we do so and we know nothing, Jon Snow. We’re basically infants, toddlers, pawing with boogery fingers at a thing we do not understand and yet a thing we are compelled to grab anyway. We don’t know how pieces fit together but we try anyway and we fuck up and choke on a DUPLO block and it doesn’t matter because we do it anyway. But somewhere along the way, some of us stop that reaching. We stop trying new things. We stop trying to outpace our own talent. Fuck that. Always reach. Always look for the next level, the new thing, a level up, ding. Muscle grows when we tear muscle. So tear your artistic muscles.

20. Work Is The Fear-Killer

Afraid? Uncertain? Anxious? Of course you are. We all are. But you punt fear in the crotch by working. Work through fear. Work begets work begets skill begets talent. You build confidence by doing. Riding a bike for the first time is scary. Riding a bike for the seventh time, less so. The 70th time? Not at all. Art is not so plain as that — some fear will always be present, and doubt will forever be a goblin in your pocket. And some of that is good: it keeps you moving, keeps you making and working. But the way through is always to do, do, do.

21. Self-Promote Your Art With Art

The artist promotes. Nobody else is going to do it for you. The trick is to do it with as much art and aplomb as you bring to the work you are promoting. Self-promotion is not an angry badger you shake at people — BUY MY ART OR YOU GET THE BADGER. Self-promotion isn’t even external from the art you’re making. Self-promo is part of the art. Consider it as organic as you can. You made a thing and now you want to talk to people about the thing. Engage and connect and create. Self-promotion is itself an art.

22. Write With Your Filters Off

We put up lots of walls between us and the work we do. We think conservatively. This won’t work. That isn’t right. There’s a rule against that. Nobody has done this before. *blows a vuvuzela in your face* No! Wrong! Destroy those walls. Eliminate your filters. Art without them. Already the act of creating art is a mechanical separation from the idea in our head — don’t insert more roadblocks and locked doors and angry badgers. Create with blissful ignorance. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe you’ll have to fix it in post. But rip away the filters with ruinous hands. Filters are NSFA — Not Safe For Art.

23. And Also, Your Pants

Because, really, pants are stupid. Pants are a tool of the oppressor. Fuck pants. Which was actually my nickname at the Rock Dove Ranch brothel outside Reno, Nevada. “HEY, CAPTAIN FUCKPANTS,” they’d say. “IT’S TIME TO MAKE LOVE FOR MONEY. NOW DRINK THIS PINK DRINK, PUT ON THIS CROTCHLESS ASTRONAUT COSTUME, AND GET IN THAT BEDROOM.” And I’d do it. Because I’m committed to my work. Anyway. So what happens when you remove thine pants?

24. Two Words: Epic Genitals

We think of artists as soft, gooey creatures. Wifty, wispy, bending in the wind. But art perseveres. Art is a hammer on an anvil. It’s carvings in walls, books that live inside history, images that mark our minds indelibly like a boot pressed into wet cement. You make things? You’re a bad ass. You have epic genitals. You are a creator. You urge unreal things into reality. You shit out gods and create fire from your mouth and spray ink and paint and unicorn blood from all your pores. Don’t think yourself weak. Don’t see making art — whether you write comic books or build whole goddamn buildings — as anything less than the generative, proliferant, tectonic act that it is.

25. Return To Center

Things will be difficult. Art is a rough road up a weird mountain. Life seems impermissible when it comes to living a live of making cool stuff. When things are hard? When you feel distracted, overwhelmed, pulled apart like soft, seedy bread — return to center. Go home to the worlds you create. Make things. Do the work. Create something new. A splash of blood on a canvas. A spatter of brain matter on the page. A bone chisel against a lump of stone. Be generative.

Art will not destroy you.

Art will save you.

* * *

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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Cassandra Rose Clarke: 130,000 Words To One Picture

How does a book cover come about? What’s right — and what’s wrong — about a book cover? What makes it good, what makes it bad, what connects it to the story or makes it insufferably distant from the material underneath? Here, author Cassandra Rose Clarke would like to talk a little bit about book covers — and then do a cover reveal of her own.

* * *

Let’s talk book covers.

In a prose-driven medium they are a quick flash of visual representation, something to appeal to what is for most of us the dominant sense. A good cover will distill a story down to its key elements, providing the picture to the book’s 100,000 words—a bad cover will come in like a wrecking ball and annihilate that shit. As a writer who dreamed of becoming a visual artist in high school, book covers have always been an interesting topic to me. They blend a wide variety of graphic design elements—not just the images themselves, but font, composition, color choice, text layout, and so on, and they do it all in service of a completely unvisual medium. It’s actually completely fascinating.

One cool thing about books covers is how they represent current aesthetic trends—and I don’t just mean in terms of just book covers. Each decade tends to be associated with certain aesthetics: in the 20thth century alone we went from art nouveau to mid-century modern to whatever the fuck was going on in the 90s. And that’s an extremely cursory overview. These aesthetics grow out of fashion and design and advertising and, oh yeah, book covers.

One of the coolest ways to track changing aesthetics is too look at the different editions of a book over the years, and one of my favorites books to do this with is the Lord of the Rings. There’s a website that looks at all the different LOTR covers from its fifty-year history, and you can really see how the covers and marketing for epic fantasy evolved over that time. The original covers, designed by Tolkien himself, are among my favorite. I especially like the cover for the Two Towers:

Look, I’m the first to admit I don’t know much about Tolkien. I’m sure there are massive Tolkien fans out there who can tell me the design was inspired by some Norse artwork from 1000 CE or some such, but to me the most striking thing about the cover is how modern—as in mid-century modern—the design looks. The art style does have a whiff of medieval Elvish about it, but I love the simple, symbolic design of the two hours and the ring itself. It’s not at terribly detailed cover, but it still manages to convey loads about the tone and story in the book.

In contrast, check out this cover from an (I believe) mid-80s edition:

Forgive me if you’re a fan, but my first reaction to this cover when I saw it in a Half Priced Books awhile back was a Channing Tatum-style AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Actually, all of this edition’s covers are pretty amazing:

LOOK AT ARAGORN. LOOK AT HIM.

But the thing is—these covers actually fit in pretty nicely with other epic fantasy covers at the time. The original Tolkien editions are gorgeous, but these covers fit in better along the Fantasy shelf of Totally Awesome SFF Books, circa 1986. I imagine if the movies hadn’t come out, we’d be stuck with editions featuring a scowly unshaven hobbit in a hooded cloak. Because that’s what Fantasy shelves look like these days.

Book cover trends can be a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing, too. Those Totally Rad LOTR covers were created because it was the trend at the time, but somebody was the first person to say, “Hey, what about vaguely photorealistic paintings of dudes looking awesome? Can that be a cover?” And then they did it, and then everybody else ripped it off for a decade. For example, we are still seeing the effects of the Twilight covers ten years on:

Whatever your feelings on Twilight might be, there’ s no denying that cover is iconic as fuck. Literally. It’s a black background with a single iconic image. As an image, it raises questions and associations: a proffered red apple is emblematic of no less than the fucking fall of humankind in the Garden of Eden, so yeah, definitely iconic. But beyond that, the cover suggests certain themes in the books, in particular the notion of temptation and desire that runs rampant through that story. Does Bella “fall” at the end of the quadrilogy by becoming a vampire? Or is her new-found immortality, combined with her new-found knowledge about the true nature of the world, a reverse fall—a way for her to enter back into the Garden of Eden?

Look at all that English major shit I pulled, all from looking at a single cover!

The Twilight covers went on to inspire tons of YA book covers, including that of The Hunger Games, which replaced the apple with an emotionally significant pin. I even remember spotting some new editions of classic novels like Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice with Twilight-style covers, hard evidence that publishers are colluding with high school teachers to trick students into finishing their required reading.

Then there’s the Twilight/Fifty Shades of Grey connection. Obviously, Fifty Shades started off as Twilight fanfic, but do you really think it was a coincidence that the Fifty Shades covers share a lot in common with the Twilight books?

There’s the same empty background and the same iconic image—this time of a sexually suggestive tie rather than an apple, as befits a romp through rich guy BDSM land. Oh, and everything’s done up in.. wait for it… wait…

SHADES

OF

GREY.

Perhaps even fifty of them. Again, whatever your thoughts on the book itself may be—I’ve never actually read it, so I’m not going to comment on it—the cover itself does a pretty phenomenal job of capturing the two biggest selling points about the Fifty Shades books: sexy times and a Twilightified origin story. And I find that fascinating.

I spend a lot of time thinking about book covers, as you can probably tell. I did this long before I became a writer. As a kid I had an elaborate system for determining which books would be well-written based on their covers alone—don’t judge a book by its cover? Nonsense! Now that I am an adult and a writer, book covers have become even more important to me, because they’re an integral part of my livelihood. Chuck let me come onto his blog and blather on about the covers of books, as opposed to the actual stories, because I have a new book cover of my own. I said at the beginning of this post that a good book cover will turn a story’s words into an image, and I’m delighted that the cover for my next book, Our Lady of the Ice, does exactly that:

I could give you the blurb for the book, which distills my 130,000 word story into 250 words—or I could show you this cover, this gorgeous fucking image, that does the same thing with five words (or as I like to call them, “the title”). There’s a reason “Ice” is the biggest word on that cover. There’s a reason that city is trapped under a dome. And there’s a reason that face belongs to a woman.

A hundred and thirty thousand words to one picture. Not a bad exchange rate, after all.

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Cassandra Rose Clarke grew up in south Texas and currently lives in a suburb of Houston, where she writes and teaches composition at a pair of local college. She holds an M.A. in creative writing from The University of Texas at Austin, and in 2010 she attended the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in Seattle. Her work has been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and YALSA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults. Her latest novel is Our Lady of the Ice, forthcoming from Saga Press in 2015. Her website is: cassandraroseclarke.com.