Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 176

S.L. Huang: Five Things I Learned Writing Zero Sum Game

Deadly. Mercenary. Superhuman. Not your ordinary math geek.

Cas Russell is good at math. Scary good.

The vector calculus blazing through her head lets her smash through armed men twice her size and dodge every bullet in a gunfight. She can take any job for the right price and shoot anyone who gets in her way.

As far as she knows, she’s the only person around with a superpower . . . but then Cas discovers someone with a power even more dangerous than her own. Someone who can reach directly into people’s minds and twist their brains into Moebius strips. Someone intent on becoming the world’s puppet master.

Someone who’s already warped Cas’s thoughts once before, with her none the wiser.

Cas should run. Going up against a psychic with a god complex isn’t exactly a rational move, and saving the world from a power-hungry telepath isn’t her responsibility. But she isn’t about to let anyone get away with violating her brain — and besides, she’s got a small arsenal and some deadly mathematics on her side. There’s only one problem . . .

She doesn’t know which of her thoughts are her own anymore.

 * * *
1. It’s far too easy to make assumptions (or, how I didn’t end up maligning the Hell’s Angels).

I try to avoid making assumptions about the types of characters I write.  But unquestioned stereotypes are so freakin’ easy to fall into; they sneak in and breed like warty little gremlins, cackling with glee as they wait to embarrass the author. Case in point: My main character gets attacked by a motorcycle gang, and when I first wrote that scene, I painted their violence as being entirely unremarkable.

Then I ended up working on a film with a bunch of actual Hell’s Angels. (My “day job” is working in Hollywood.  Yes, my life is awesome.)

It turns out they were all very nice guys.  Tough, yes, and I DEFINITELY wouldn’t want to cross them, but if you didn’t fuck with them, they weren’t going to fuck with you.  And they were great people to work with: respectful and on the ball and dedicated to doing the best job they could.

And one of them said to me when we were shooting the breeze off set — he told me about how much it bugs them, the way they’re portrayed in the media, and how they’re trying to fight against that.  Show the world that’s not who they are.

I said, “Oh.  Um.  Yeah.”  Then I went home and completely switched around the way my main character responds to the biker attack.

It’s so fucking easy not to question things.

2. Write what you love.  You can get the haters to love it, too.

As someone who was essentially writing mathematical fiction — which is even further down the Mohs scale than hard scifi — I was terrified that NOBODY WOULD ENJOY IT.  After all, hating math is practically a meme.

What happened: My non-math betas not only loved it, they demanded I add MORE MATH.  And they told me over and over again, “Your audience is not just math nerds.  This has much wider appeal than you think it does.”

Well, that was more luck than anything, I admit.  But I am now utterly fearless about writing pretty much whatever I feel like — because if it’s possible to make a book about math entertaining to math-haters, then hell, it’s possible with anything!

3. Sometimes you have to fuck the research.

I’ve always been a research fiend.  Get everything right.  Down to the smallest detail.

I researched the shit out of everything in Zero Sum Game.  And I remember very clearly the moment I found out a very minor detail of law enforcement procedure, sat down to fix it, and realized (1) I COULD fix it, but (2) fixing it would utterly fuck up my pacing. It would make the book less enjoyable.

After much agonizing, I fudged things a little and left it the way it was.

And a part of me died a little inside, the super-obsessive-research-fiend part of me.  (That part of me still can’t believe I did it.)  But I’ll stand by the decision, no matter how guilty I feel admitting it — because it was what the story needed, and the story had to come first.

I now understand better why some creators take the liberties they do.

4. Good editors are amazeballs.

I write super clean prose and I had four ridiculously good beta readers and an expert linguist who copyedited dialect for me.  I’d been told professional editing would still level me up, but I’m not sure I truly grokked how much until I started working with my editor.

Boy howdy, then I got it.

My editor’s name is Anna Genoese, and she was incredible.  Many of her changes were seemingly tiny — a suggested comma here, moving a paragraph break down one sentence there.  But the difference was like the difference between a nice, serviceable handgun versus one with a retouched trigger pull and customized sights and fancy custom grips that fit in your hand like they’re growing out of your palm.  One you might look at and say, “Yeah, cool, this is a solid piece of work,” but the other one you say, “OMG I’M SO TURNED ON I WANT TO LICK THIS WEAPON.”

. . . it’s possible I’ve been writing about guns for far too long.

Anyway: Love your editors.  Love them like the godlike beings they are.

5. Community matters.

Once I finished the rough draft of Zero Sum Game, I decided I needed some sort of online presence . . . thing.  So I started a blog and joined Absolute Write.

Holy motherfucking crap.

The knowledge on those boards was like drinking from a firehose.  I learned more in my first month on AW than I’d learned in all of my prior research combined.

And then I started to develop relationships.

Friends.  People I bonded with about writing like we were covered in barnacle glue. Writing began eating my life whole even more than it already had, because it became something I was doing with my best friends.

Now we gather in a chatroom every morning and do writing rounds together.  We beta for each other and brainstorm with each other. We also support each other and mock each other and recommend books and make sex jokes and more often than not devolve into depravity.  They’re immensely talented people, to the point where I look at myself and say, “Self, I am so knock-down jealous of you for having such cool friends.  You do not deserve these people.”

Granted, a lot of this was luck, but if I’d known beforehand how awesome it would be, I would’ve done everything in my power to make it happen, including rewriting the laws of the time-space continuum to make sure I met them. Because if I look at before I had a writing community versus now, it feels like I went from eating only gruel to discovering the world contained PIZZA AND MANGOS AND BACON AND CHOCOLATE.

Plus, you know, now I know at least nine people will buy my book.

* * *

SL Huang majored in mathematics at MIT. The program did not include training to become a superpowered assassin-type. Sadly.

S.L. Huang: Website | Twitter

Zero Sum Game: Available March 31st, 2014 | Add on Goodreads

Wendy Wagner: Five Things I Learned Writing Skinwalkers

As a young woman, Jendara left the cold northern isles of the Ironbound Archipelago to find her fortune. Now, many years later, she’s forsaken her buccaneer ways and returned home in search of a simpler life, where she can raise her young son Kran in peace. When a strange clan of shapeshifting raiders pillages her home, however, there’s no choice for Jendara but to take up her axes once again to help the islanders defend all that they hold dear.

From author Wendy N. Wagner comes a new adventure of vikings, lycanthropes, and the ties of motherhood, set in the award-winning world of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

* * *

1. BABIES ARE NOT FOR EATING.

You’d think this one would be obvious, but clearly you haven’t spent time in my head, where my chain of logic went: “If cannibalism is bad, and I want my bad guys to be really bad, then they shouldn’t just eat human being,  they should have a taste for the cutest, snuggliest form of human flesh imaginable!” Certain I was a genius, I wrote a baby-snacking scene while chortling gleefully.

Luckily, other people read my novel before it went to press and pointed out a flaw in my thinking. Yes, eating babies is evil. It’s so evil that if you want the cannibals in your story to ever be more than villainous puppets fit only for destruction, you’d better not include it. That’s why zombies can eat whatever they want to eat–they’re exactly the kinds of villain you feel just fine about nuking from orbit. They’re totally beyond redemption. Besides, any group of people that sees babies as a scrumptious morsel will probably eat itself into extinction. It’s just stupid. And gross. So I got rid of both baby-eating scenes originally included in the novel

Note: I would never eat a baby. In fact, I love babies. I just want to hold them and kiss their sweet-smelling heads and nibble on their adorable toes. Ummn … maybe I should stop talking now.

2. FIND-AND-REPLACE IS A WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION

Sometimes you have to make a repetitive change to your manuscript. Maybe you’ve changed a character’s name or you realized someone’s hair really ought to be brown, not blond. (True story: I went through the entire novel thinking Jendara had blond hair, even though I looked at a picture of her every single day I was writing. Maybe I should get my eyes checked.) The fastest way to make sure you fix every reference to this erroneous word is to call in an air strike and wipe it out. That’s right: find-and-replace.

Now find-and-replace has saved my life many times. In Skinwalkers, I used it whenever I changed my mind about the spelling of one crew-member’s name–so about once a week. But one mistaken find-and-replace can cause you no end of problems. For example, I called one kind of boat a “raider” in the first draft of the novel. But I decided it sounded too Battlestar Galactica, and decided I’d better change it to “long ship” to better convey a Viking image. But did I type “long ship” into the Replace field? Nope. Instead, my nautically bemused brain wrote “longboat.” And like an idiot, I hit enter, changing a vast swathe of Nordic watercraft into the kind of large row boat Ishmael and Ahab cruised around in. I didn’t catch it until I turned in my manuscript, and my editor thought I was nuts.

Don’t be me! Be very, very careful whenever you use find-and-replace. Heck, take the time to approve every change. The extra twenty minutes might really pay off. I wound up changing half of those long ships into a totally different kind of small, clinker-built boat that’s much better suited for the book.

3. RESEARCH BREEDS SERENDIPITY

Skinwalkers may be set in an imaginary world, but I did a great deal of research on the folklore, art, plants, geology, and climate of the places on our planet that are most like its setting: Scandinavia. Outside of watching Troll Hunter, I didn’t have a lot of knowledge about that part of the world, and I wanted the book to be filled with the flavor of the former Viking realm. I read a lot of travel guides and blogs about Norway and Denmark.

And then I found the stamps of the Faroe Islands.

While looking for images from Norse mythology, I kept finding artwork on stamps from this tiny little country. The Faroe Islands are located between the tip of Scotland and the bottom of Iceland. Their language is very close to Old Norse, and they are very proud of their culture–hence the stamps. Photographs of their shoreline directly inspired my favorite setting in the entire novel, a small, spooky island called “the Isle of Ancestors.“

Research will pay off more than you can ever expect it to. Wade into the flow of information with your eyes open, and you might find gold.

4. KEEP ON KEEPING ON.

I’m not going to lie: Even though my editor reassured me that my book needed very few substantive edits, the list of changes he sent me was longer than some short stories I’ve sold. Looking at it nearly made me hyperventilate. It looked like work. A lot of work.

But there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last few years, and that’s not be afraid of doing the work. I just printed out the list, broke down the larger problems into sequences of smaller tasks, and I did it. I checked off everything as I accomplished it, and if I fixed something that broke something else, I just wrote it down on my secondary to-do list. And eventually, I fixed everything.

Remember: there’s not much you can’t do if you cut it up into smaller tasks and you just keep at it.

5. I AM AN INADVERTENT MISOGYNIST. 

Let’s just get one thing straight: Pathfinder is a game for anyone, no matter their gender. That’s something I like about the organization, and I was really excited to get to write them a character who is a strong woman with many facets. Jendara spends a lot of time fighting, but she’s also a caring mother, a semi-successful homemaker who is happy to share the domestic load with her son and companions, and she’s a great friend to men and women alike. I felt really good about turning in a manuscript with characters who were good role models for equality.

But when it was time to revise, my editor pointed out many, many instances of gender-biased language. I lost count of the number of times I referred to a group of fighters as “men.” In situations with a crowd, I almost never described anyone but the guys. Jendara may have been a well-rounded female character, but she was definitely a rarity in her world.

I’m a woman and I believe very firmly in equality for all human beings. I was pretty ashamed to see my own work, and I’m glad I got a chance to fix it before it went out in the world. It’s all too easy to use those same old phrases without thinking about them, but as a writer, it’s my job to think hard about the world I’m making with my words. Do I want it to be the same world that’s told women they have to stay home out of sight, or do I want it to be a world where everyone can adventure, no matter their gender?

Writing Skinwalkers was a major learning experience. I couldn’t be more glad for the education.

* * *

Wendy Wagner: Website | Twitter

Skinwalkers: Amazon | B&N

Stupid Answers To Common Writing Questions

I receive questions over email. I get questions at conferences. I thought I’d sum up some of my answers to those questions here! Please to enjoy.

How Do I Write?

I don’t know how you write. I know how I write. And how I write is, I line up a bunch of words and jam them together into sentences, then I jam those sentences together into paragraphs, and those paragraphs cram together into pages, pages into chapters, chapters into a whole story, and when all of it is said and done I try to make sure all of it is saying something, that all of it has a point, a purpose, a narrative connecting ideas and characters and events and that all of it is buoyed by some kind of hidden but not-that-hidden message called a “theme.” I do this a little bit, every day, until I’m done, and even then I’m not really done, because writing is rewriting is rewriting is rewriting is [insert me wandering through a hedge maze covered in ink here].

How Do I Find The Time To Write?

You do not find the time to write. You make it. You snatch it from the jaws of whatever temporal beast has your minutes and hours clamped between its gnarly teeth. We all fight for our time, whether it’s time for a meal, time for a TV show, time to mow the lawn, time to masturbate wantonly on the neighbor’s front porch so that their cat can watch you from the family room window. Time is not a lost set of car keys. It’s not extra money you find in a pants pocket just before you wash them. Time is a thing for which you fight. And if you want to write, you need to fight for the time to accomplish that task. Because time doesn’t care about you. It keeps on keeping on until you’re mulch for the fucking marigolds. Seize it. Or don’t. It doesn’t care.

How Long Should It Take Me To Write My Book?

It takes between one hour and one glacial epoch. Jesus, I dunno. Every book has its own clock. I know, that’s a dumb and obvious answer but that’s the goddamn answer. This book over here can be written in three weeks. That book over there can be written in three years. It takes the time it takes. You can make it go faster with practice and determination. Faster doesn’t always mean better, though — it just means faster.

How Do I Edit My Book?

I dunno. You just… you just fucking do, okay? Imagine that you want to take a sentence, any sentence, and edit that sentence. You might rearrange the words. You might excise words or add new ones that are more appropriate, that have more dramatic weight. You would aim to make the sentence be both clear and interesting to the ear. That’s editing. Now do it with a whole paragraph, page, chapter, book. And now it’s not just about little sentence-flavored bits but about character and ideas and events and theme and blah blah blah — there’s no “one way” to edit. You just do it. It’s like crawling through an earthquaked city in the dark, through the mud and the broken glass, trying to put the whole thing back together again. It takes time. There’s no magic, no equation. It’s just you putting the world right, one thing at a time.

How Do I Get Published?

You write something that doesn’t suck, maybe something that you even love a little bit, and you either flash a little narrative leg to an agent or an editor or you publish it yourself. Write the best book you can write.

How Do I Get An Agent?

You find a way to get your book in front of them, ideally via whatever means they prefer. Query letters, pitch sessions, a hand-up from a fellow writer. Whatever. If an agent says, “I want you to give me your logline, except you should tattoo it onto the back of a shaved grizzly bear and that bear should be trained to fight four New York City taxi cabs in front of my office,” then hey, there’s your way forward. Do all this with the best book you can write.

How Do I Market?

I have no fiddly fucking idea. Writers are supposed to be good at writing, not marketing — I wasn’t trained in that particular discipline. I feel like asking a writer how to market best is like asking a writer how to grow good string beans or how best to dismantle a rogue mechanical chimpanzee. Here’s how I market: I try to be the best version of myself, and I try to be a human being engaging with other human beings as much as my time allows, and then sometimes I will say, “Hello, I have this book, and you might like this book because XYZ,” and then once in a while I’ll try to do some kind of other shameless gallumphing about where I give books away or do a nude cam show or something. The best way forward is to get other people to market your books because we’d all much rather be sold something based on love than shameless self-promotion. If I say BUY MY BOOK you’re going to nod and hmm and, “Well, of course he’d say that, its his book.” But if someone within your circle of trust says to buy my book, suddenly you’re a lot more motivated because that person’s only motivation is to share love.

How Do I Build My Brand?

You — you just — please, don’t. Blech. Blargh. Myeaaaaargh. And other pukey-poopy noises. I have a whole schtick about brands that you’ve heard before but I’ll schtick it up again which is this: a brand is what you put on a cow to represent ownership. A brand is about keeping the herd in a fence. A brand is artifice: a thing levied by a corporate entity onto a product so that we all think a specific thing and get a particular feeling about that product even if that is a lie. A brand burns you. A brand marks you. It is a vulnerability because if you brand yourself one way and then find that doesn’t work or need to re-brand, you’re going to have a hard time. Many authors have found themselves trapped by their own brands. Who wants to read a book by a brand? Who wants to interface with a carefully-orchestrated persona? Be a person. Find your voice. Let your voice be the thing that identifies you. Resist branding. Resist other corporate, businessy labels. Again: be the best version of yourself. And write the best book you can fucking write.

How Do I Build My Audience?

You do not build an audience. They’re not a set of shelves. You earn your audience. By — drum roll please! — being a cool person who writes good books. Ta-da!

How Do I Build My Platform?

Every time I turn around I receive divergent definitions of platform. Is it the technical apparatus by which you reach an audience? Is it the audience itself, or the immeasurable reach you have with that audience? Is it your social media account, or the stats that come with that account? Is it your expertise in a given field, or the audience you already possess in that given field? Is it a blog? Is it a box you stand on, a bullhorn you scream through? Fuck platforms. Platforms sound like you’re up on high, talking down. Wade into the crowd. Be amongst the readers and the writers and shake hands and kiss babies and — whew, I dunno how many times I can say this but here it is, write the best book you can and be the best version of yourself.

Should I Blog / Tweet / Facebook / Slather Myself In Social Media?

Your publisher said you should, maybe, or you read that in a book of advice that writers need to blog. You don’t need to blog. You don’t need to do anything except a) best book b) best version of yourself. How you convey those two things to the world via the Internet is up to you. But for fuck’s sake, don’t blog if you don’t want to. Don’t tweet if it doesn’t make you happy. Writing can be lucrative but it’s not so lucrative a career you should tromp around in ugly spaces just because someone said you should. I’ve seen no confirmed correlation between Blogging and Book Sales. Every tweet doesn’t move copies. Especially if the only reason you’re doing that is just as some kind of social media obligation, some ham-fisted marketing strategy. If your publisher demands you blog because of marketing, tell them that’s their job, and they can write the blog themselves.

What Trends Are Hot Right Now?

I don’t know because I don’t care and you shouldn’t really care either. Again: this is probably bad business advice but it’s great creative advice. Fuck trends. Trying to write to trends is like trying to thread a needle whilst riding the back of a bucking bull. Don’t be the dog chasing the car. Be the car driving away from the dog. You know what’s great? A trend-setting book. You know what’s less great? The ten weaker reiterations that come down the line from authors and publishers hoping to chase that trend.

How Do I –

I don’t know. The more and more I go, the more I know that I don’t know. The more I realize that a lot of this thing we do is very random and very uncertain and is given over to two notable forces, two forces that I have repeatedly screamed in your poor ear this whole post: Be the best version of yourself and Write the best book you can. Do these things as often as you are able. More shots at the goal, y’know? Everything else is uncertain. Nothing else is confirmed. The ground is moving beneath our feet but those two things are the constants amidst the chaos. And even then, you’ll find jerk-ass authors succeeding with awful books and that’s just life, and it’s not worth getting upset about. Beyond that? The facts aren’t facts. Everything is theory. I can’t tell you how to do things. I can only tell you how I have done them and am doing them now and if you take something away from this that helps you, then I’m happy. If it doesn’t help you, then at least I’ve hopefully entertained you. Writers have no one way forward. We have so many ways through this wild land. And every one of us — accidentally or on purpose — burns the map after.

Best book you can write.

Best version of yourself you can be.

Demonstrate these things.

Go and write.

25 Things You Should Know About Life With A Toddler

Maybe you’re a new parent. Or want to be a parent someday. Or you’re long past your Toddler-Wrangling Years and want to look back with nostalgia and pants-shitting terror over that time. Hell, even if you qualify as none of those things, you will still likely be one day in the presence of a Toddler or Toddler-Shaped Creature, and so, I present to you this Handy Guide.

Now we can all get tattoos: TODDLERLIFE4EVA.

1. they are little fallen gods

Babies believe that they are the gods of their world. Literally. Their minds — as undeveloped as 99% of the screenplays in the world — are utterly unable to process the reality that they have not created everything around them and that they are the physical and emotional center of the whole goddamn universe. Ah, but brain development is not slow in these little unfuzzy chimpanzees we call our “children,” and by the time they’re toddlers, the truth starts to enter into the equation: you do not control everything and all things do not serve you because you are not, in fact, divine. That’s what toddlers are wrestling with. Imagine that. “You’re not actually a god.” “But you said–” “I was wrong.” “But I thought I made all this–” “You didn’t.” “I’m still important, right?” “If that helps you sleep at night, which it won’t, because toddlers sleep like shit.” Turns out, age is really just our brains gaining the maturity to realize how small we are in the grand scheme of things. The older we get, the less significant we realize we are. Regardless, when you’re trying to figure out why a toddler is acting the way she is, just remember: she thought she was a god, then learned that she was not.

2. their rules are labyrinthine and inexplicable

Watching a toddler is like watching an alien creature build some kind of extraterrestrial machine. It’s like watching ritually-peculiar Druid magic, or the interpretive dance of a sentient spam-bot. Our boy-human will put on an Indiana Jones hat and start calling himself “Nemo.” He’ll hand you things and then demand you hold them and if you try to give them back you’ve broken some ancient changeling contract. He’ll require a very particular truck and if you hand him one that is 95% the same truck, he’ll actually hate you — like, maybe literally hate you — for at least two minutes. (Then he’ll forget.) He’ll place things around the room or perform a sequence of events that, for all you know, is meant to unlock some kind of apocalypse. It’s methodical and maddening, like a bird building a nest out of watch parts. Other times? He’s not like that at all.

3. the wolverine tornado

Take a bunch of wolverines. Throw them into a roaring F5 tornado. That’s a toddler. It’ll tear through your home, shrieking and whirling about, scooping things up and depositing them elsewhere. It’ll lose things. It’ll destroy other things. It’ll change direction in the hair’s breadth of a moment — “I’m doing this no now I’m doing this other thing wait what’s that over there.”

4. unpredictable and inconsistent meltdowns

The toddler meltdown is an awesome thing, and I mean awesome in the truest old-school sense: awe will strike you, and you may be left very afraid — or laughing your ass off. Sometimes the meltdowns are easy to see coming: you’ve said “no” to a vital question (like, “can I have this?”) or you’re trying to take them to the doctor or make them wear pants or treat you with a modicum of respect. Other times the meltdowns arrive like a piece of space junk: an unpredictable meteor without warning. You’ll offer them ice cream and you’ll think well, it’s ice cream, who the fuck doesn’t like ice cream and want it basically every hour of every day but the toddler will suddenly freak the fuck out because you violated some secret cosmic decree. And you’ll laugh, of course, because it’s just to absurd to do otherwise, and you laughing will make the meltdown worse, and the toddler will be spinning around on the floor like Curly from the Three Stooges and you’ll laugh even harder because man, what is happening? Is this even real?

5. without food and sleep they are basically hill cannibals

Two guaranteed meltdown triggers, however, are: hungry and tired. May the gods help you if both the SLEEP and FOOD boxes remain unchecked because I’m pretty sure that’s how you get the Reavers from Firefly. If ever you are near a toddler and you’re like, “I have no idea what’s wrong with this flailing creature,” ask yourself — when did they last eat? And when did they last sleep? Fix one or both as swiftly as the time-space continuum allows.

6. you will end up watching some utterly horrid children’s programming

We do not plunk our toddler down in front of the TV as if it is a flashing cyclopean babysitter — but we do let him watch certain programs and we sit with him and talk to him about what he’s seeing and oh my god some kid’s shows are basically bamboo splinters shoved under your fingernails. Barney the Dinosaur belongs in a tar-pit (actually, I’d watch that show — just thirty minutes of the big purple sonofabitch wobbling and sinking into the tarry mire). The Wiggles are totally a pack of creepy singing kidnappers. Don’t even get me started on Thomas the Tank Engine – that dead-eyed train lives on an island where everyone is praised for their usefulness and yet nobody actually seems to be useful because somehow they thought the most efficient freight-shipping system would be to imbue locomotives with petty toddler personalities and oh hey that didn’t work out yet again who knew. That island is eventually going to turn into something out of a horror novel. “Thomas the Tank Engine and Blaine the Mono in SODOR AND GOMORRAH.” As a sidenote, you can happily poison your child’s mind against such wretched programming. “You know what I heard? I heard Thomas steals children. He steals them and drives them into deep tunnels and then eats them. Sleep tight, tiny one.”

7. you will end up watching some awesome children’s programming

Some kiddie shows? Totally fucking awesome. Curious George is fun and funny and the chimp (who they call a “monkey,” which is clearly wrong) is a toddler-analog who is fumbling his way through existence. (Though why everyone lets George have such heaps and mounds of responsibility is beyond me. Is this some apocalyptic future where they don’t have enough people to perform essential functions? “Sure, little chimp, I trust you to babysit my grandchild / run the farm / be an astronaut. None of this can go wrong!”) Martha Speaks is well above toddler-level but our son loves it and as a writer how can I not love a show that treats words as important and wonderful? Sarah & Duck. Or Pocoyo. Or Peppa Pig. Some really good, really funny, truly instructive and empathetic kiddie shows out there. (Oh, and there’s a preschool-variant of Transformers so, hey, that’s my nostalgia-gland milked for its precious juice.)

8. not all children’s books are created equally, either

I went into buying books for my son with the attitude of, all books for him are good! which is about as deeply dopey as saying all science-fiction books are great or every political book makes a darn good point no matter who wrote it. Some kid’s books are simple and sweet. Some children’s books have really good stories and really nice messages. And some books are, ehhh, unnnh, no. Goodnight, Moon is an eerie, David Lynch-ian dip — the creepy rabbit lady, the picture of the “bears” (clearly men in bear suits) sitting in chairs, the line, “Goodnight, Nobody, Goodnight, mush.” Why is the evil old rabbit lady feeding this kid gruel? Why is there a red telephone in the kid’s room? WHAT MONSTER WILL CALL AT MIDNIGHT? And don’t even get me started on Doctor Seuss. Children’s books by a dude who hates children. You ever actually read Hop on Pop out loud? It will break your mind. It will turn the gaze of angry chaos gods to your home and conjure dread entities. OH THE THINGS YOU WILL SUMMON.

9. boys love trucks

My son is as likely to cradle a truck going to sleep as he is a stuffed animal. He will literally, at night, sleep-babble about trucks, or have nightmares about people trying to take his trucks away.

10. girls also love trucks

Girls also love trucks. Our toddler’s trucks bring the girls to the yard. They love trucks (and probably don’t have any at home). Our son also loves kitchen stuff. And pink dolls. Because toys are awesome no matter their gender. Have I already ranted about this? I have, indeed.

11. secret toy traps

You will break your neck on a toy car or tiny truck. You will feel the unforgettable misery of a Duplo block driven deep into the soft meat of your unsocked foot. You will round the corner and trip on a cairn of blocks, Batmans, Transformers, and teddy bears. Toddlers leave toy traps around. At first I thought this was just part of the chaos, right? They’re little tornados and they whirl about, levying chaos against an ordered world. (Seriously, if we clean up a room and leave him unoccupied two rooms away for three minutes, somehow the clean room will have descended into a dirty, cluttered proto-state. Toddlers are entropy given form. Coastlines erode because of toddlers. Rust on metal? Toddlers.) But now I start to think they leave the little traps behind to thwart us parents (who are in turn usually trying to thwart the toddlers). Sidenote: toddlers also seem to poop toys. You can put the toddler in a room with no toys and come back five minutes later and he’ll have a toy you have never seen before. Our toddler has — *counts on fingers and toes* — about 4,112 trucks, and I think we bought him about seven of those.

12. surprising empathy

I have perhaps painted toddlers as cruel little fallen gods and snargling chaos beasties who have descended into our world from another so that they can spread their Seussian Gospel and answer the Red Telephone in order to transmit the Sodor Virus — and all of that is true, totally true, not a word of it is false. But it’s important to note that, really, toddlers are just little humans, and as humans, they can be surprisingly capable of empathy. They feel bad if you feel bad. They want to make your boo-boos feel better. They laugh just because you find something funny, not because they actually understand it. They are highly tuned into the parent frequency, and this is very important with what you, as the parent, put out there. You put out anxiety and anger, you’re going to get anxiety and anger in return.

13. bewildering leaps in intelligence

Said before, will say again: every day with a toddler is like that moment in Jurassic Park where the velociraptors learn how to open doors. It’s like watching a character in an RPG level up super-fast. “Ah, he just learned the ‘cut up his own food’ skill. He just leveled up in ‘open locked doors.’ He’s counting now. OH JESUS HE’S FIGURED OUT QUANTUM MECHANICS — WHO BUILT THIS HADRON COLLIDER IN OUR PANTRY?”

14. someone may actually sneak into your house at night and teach them stuff

I have a theory that someone sneaks into our home at night — some wayward teacher, maybe, or I dunno, a fucking house elf or some shit — and teaches our son new things. Because daily he surprises me with words and ideas that have come seemingly out of nowhere. Most of his exposure to things comes from his family; he’s not in daycare or anything. So when he suddenly starts using words that we don’t use or he makes leaps of logic that are smarter than what I would’ve put together — I’m pretty sure that he has a midnight class with some ancient astronaut who shows up in a beam of light and instructs him on things I forgot to teach him.

15. toddlerian fears

As toddlers start to grow in intelligence, they also grow in fear. I’m sure this has evolutionary purpose — after all, fear has some value to us. I am afraid of tigers because tigers will eat me. I am afraid of heights because that’s where you fall from. I am afraid of the dark because I know that’s where the undead serial killer is hiding right now with his burlap sack of body parts. You will watch your toddler’s fears evolve and grow. They start to fear strangers. They fear being alone. They fear the dark. Our son is now afraid of shadows, which means he’ll say creepy-ass shit like (true story): the shadows are sleeping, Daddy. Just the other night he noted he was afraid because people might come and “take him away” in the middle of night, which dovetails so elegantly with my own fears about him that I was ready to load a shotgun and sit vigil in his room all night.

16. you can’t actually move a toddler to where you want them to go

I was a dick about kids and parents when I did not myself have a kid. I was Judgey McJudgerson, judging you with my judgey-face. A crying kid on a plane would stress me out. I’d think — as do many other asshole adults — DO SOMETHING WITH YOUR CHILD. Having a kid now has, erm, softened that judgment. I admittedly still think some parents are way too disconnected from their children (and way more connected to their goddamn iPhones — “Hey, is my toddler in traffic? Candy Crush, bitches!”), but in general, I’m a lot more sympathetic because you can’t just “control” a toddler. They’re not a lamp you can move into the corner and turn on and off. They’re not even dogs. They’re tiny human beings with orangutan strength. I used to think, “Just physically control them, just put them somewhere, like in a drawer or something,” but toddlers do this trick where they either let all the tension go out of their bodies or they instead flail about like an unmanned fire-hose. Imagine trying to wrestle an angry octopus, and you get the idea.

17. if this is your first night at fight club

With toddlers: pick your goddamn battles. I don’t mean literally — like, with sticks and Paintball or something? I mean every day spent with one of these tiny humans is filled with the infinite possibility of any number of battles. Battles over which toys will go in the tub, over where he will or will not put a sippy-cup, over whether or not he will hold still long enough to have one sock placed upon his karate-kicking foot. If you get into the mud and scrap over everything, you will drown in that mud. Because here’s the thing: once you start the battle? You have to win that shit. Have to, have to, have to. Losing one battle means losing the war. If they detect that they can win? They will always fight to win. You’re trying to outlast a guerilla force. You’re trying to outwit a tiny, diaper-clad version of the Joker. So: when you have picked a battle, that is always the hill you need to die on, whether it’s about what dinner she will or will not eat or if he should or should not try to stick his head up the dog’s butt.

18. inoculate against disappointment

Emotionally speaking, toddlers are teeth without enamel — they’re turtles without shells, entirely exposed to the buffeting winds and crashing waves of all the negative things. One of the jobs I see myself possessing as parent of a tiny human is to inoculate said tiny human with the occasional dose of disappointment. Because when they start out, every disappointment is keenly and equally felt. “No, you may not play with my phone” has as much negative metaphysical weight as “All of life is a parade toward death.” The only way forward is to give them little tastes of disappointment so that they develop the coping skills necessary. “We don’t have any cereal in the pantry,” I lie, just so I encourage him to a) eat something else this morning and b) deal with his disappointment on his own terms so that when true disappointment reaches him, he’ll have built up some manner of chitinous exoskeleton to protect him against sorrow.

19. sometimes you want to feed them to a family of bears

It’s true. Life with a toddler is tough. Some days you’re just looking for a box to put them in so you can mark it FREE CUPCAKES and leave it out by the curb.

20. they’re basically proto-teenagers

I’m older, now, but not so old I forget what my teenage years were like. Let’s see… inexplicable behavior? Check. Surly for no reason? Yep. Unpredictably disrespectful? Mm-hmm. What else seems familiar… needy? Tantrums? Hungry all the time? Solipsistic egotists? Toddlers are just unformed teenagers. Which means I’m going to see this behavior again in ten years, yay.

21. erratic pinballs

Watching our toddler run around the house is like watching an animated, drunken stack-of-tea-cups wibble and wobble about. Toddlers are, I figure, about 30 seconds from doom at any given moment. Theirs, yours, the dog’s, or that of some precious family heirloom. They have the good sense the gods gave coked-up lemurs. Which is to say: practically none at all.

22. manipulators on par with none

Toddlers know your weaknesses and will exploit them. They are supervillains — just give them a volcanic lair and a freaky cat to stroke. The trick is, of course, that toddlers are big-eyed little adorbs-machines. They radiate cuteness waves that wash over you, drawing all the sand on your beaches out to sea until every last defense is down. You feel bad when they cry. You believe them when they lie. They will manipulate the bed-time hour from 7:30PM to somewhere around 12:15 in the morning. You’ll mean to feed them a nice healthy dinner at the table but will somehow end up in front of the TV letting them just scoop sugar from the bag into their greedy mouths. You’ll literally look around and wonder in the David Byrne-ian sense: how did I get here? The thing is, they’re not always manipulating you, and a truly skilled parent will know when the toddler has a real problem or when she’s just acting as a two-year-old version of Keyser Soze.

23. the ghosts of family members live inside of them

These family members will rise to the surface of the pool from time to time. You’ll see your father’s face. Your grandfather’s eyes. Your uncle’s penchant to pick his nose in the coat closet. Occasionally our son will say things the way my father said them — both word choice and inflection of word choice and it’s completely fucking spooky.

24. playtime is when all of it comes crashing together

The toddler reaches its purest, most toddlerian state during playtime.

25. this is when formless blob becomes an honest to jeebus human being

Infants are dull as berber carpet. Everyone loves them, of course — they’re the equivalent of newborn seals, all big eyes and funny squeaks and roly-poly cuteness. But seriously: super-boring. Toddlers are where the fun begins. Toddlers are where you get to watch the paramecium grow legs and start to dance. Personality develops and dominates. They manifest wants, needs, fears, quirks, habits, words, ideas, even stories. They’re sweet. They’re mean. They’re emotional. They’re wise. They’re wild, bouncy superballs flung at the wall. They’re smarter than you think and dumber than you expect. They flip and flop and gallumph about. Roundabout way of saying: they’re becoming people. This is volcanic: the bleak earth shattering and revealing a pyroclasm of new earth and unseen life. This is chrysalis: gone is the tiny lump and emerging is the weird-ass butterfly with its own way of doing things. If you want to know when Human Beings really become Human Beings, look no further than the toddlers scampering around.

Tell Me Of A Book You Read And Loved In 2014

I feel like the title says it all.

Still! To clarify:

It’s time to talk about books you’re digging. So, your goal is to drop into the comments and give us one book — and I hate that I have to say this but not your own book — that you read this year and loved. And do tell us why you dug it, yeah? This can be new books from this year, but isn’t restricted to this particular slice of temporal pie.

I’ll offer up two books I just read –

The Incorruptibles by John Hornor Jacobs, and Authority, by Jeff Vandermeer. The former is a Gunslingery fantasy with demon-bound steamships and guns and bloodthirsty elves in an alternate version of America. It’s short, but richly-layered, and John’s writing is like quicksand: one step in and you’re already drawn down and trapped within the prose. The latter book is about a thousand miles from the former, but equally amazing. Authority is the follow-up to Annihilation, and does a great job at answering questions from the first book while introducing a multiplying rabbit litter of enigmas all its own. It is a masterpiece of creepy, queasy discomfort. Vandermeer wields unease like a weapon. His prose is dense, a thicket you sometimes need to chop through, but worth the effort.

And yes, I know I told you to recommend one book and I’m recommending two but IT’S MY BLOG I CAN VIOLATE THE RULES IF I WANT TO and also cry if I want to and also eat cake frosting with my fingers if I want to SHUT UP AND DON’T JUDGE ME.

See you in the comments, word-nerds.

Titanfall: My Late Early Impressions (Shut Up)

I’ve had Titanfall (Xbox One) for like, almost two weeks now, but haven’t really played because of work and traveling and toddler and something-something liquor.

But, today, I cracked into one-half of the campaign.

Here, then, are my impressions:

The Awesome:

The game is easy. Or, feels easy, at least.

It’s orchestrated toward Awesome Moments. First match, I got blown up, ejected out straight up into the air, fired an anti-titan missile straight down and killed the big giant robot that had blown my ass apart in the first place. Again: this was my first match.

Pilots are nimble-footed. Game feels like there’s nowhere you can’t go. The wall-running and double-jumping give your movement a very fluid sensibility, which is nice.

Fast to respawn. Minimal downtime as a result.

Titans are not immortal killing machines. A single pilot can take one down. Not easily, though.

It’s really fun. That sounds simplistic, but it’s a game, so that matters.

Short matches let you just jump in, shoot some motherfuckers, then go do something else.

I GET TO STOMP AROUND IN GIANT ROBOTS WITH GUNS AAAAAAH YAY

The Less-Than-Awesome:

It’s very, very fast-paced. More Unreal than Halo. Curiously, as I get older, my reflexes in video games slow equally to mine in life — I prefer a slower, more methodical game. I like the slightly plodding run of the soldiers in Call of Duty. Pilots here feel like ninjas running around, and they’re hard to shoot. (Piloting a Titan feel more fun because of this, actually.)

Game matches tend to be frenetic.

Sorely lacking a single-player game.

Multiplayer on Xbox One has nobody talking. Likely due to the fact none of us have mics/headsets, and it won’t use the Kinect that way — and why do we need the Kinect again? As a result, it feels like a multiplayer match of individuals, which is not super-great in a team-based game. It’s mostly just a bunch of assholes running around playing their own game.

You start the game underpowered, and it shows. That first match it’s like, every time you pop your head out, somebody is shooting it off. Though by my fourth game I was feeling comfortable and with enough option to not feel like a total gopher at the hole.

The campaign is doofy. It’s a veneer of single-player staple-gunned onto a multiplayer-only game, which — y’know, don’t bother. Never half-ass two things — whole-ass one thing. Of course, to unlock things, you gotta play the campaign anyway, soooooo, poop noise.

Overall?

It’s cool. It’s fun. It’s easy-breezy.

If you like this sort of thing, you’ll love this particular thing.

If you do not like this sort of thing, you’ll hate this particular thing.

If you’re looking for single-player: ain’t here. Maybe one day (but I doubt it).

Flash Fiction Challenges: Ten Little Chapters

Last week’s challenge: Somethingpunk!

This week’s challenge is simple in description, but perhaps complex in execution.

It is about pacing and arrangement.

A piece of flash fiction is usually treated in a certain way — it’s short, so it uses the brevity of the form to often capture a snapshot in time.

We’re going to open that up a little bit.

You still have 1000 words.

But you’re going to break that up into 10 chapters.

Now, ostensibly that works out to about 100 words per chapter, though variation on that is fine. However you see fit to make it work. The goal here is to maintain brevity but increase scope. Can you tell a larger story in a smaller space? Does breaking it up make that easier — or harder?

Otherwise, standard rules apply.

Any genre will do.

Post at your blog, then drop a link in the comments here to that blog.

Due by next Friday, March 28th, noon EST.

1000 words, split into ten chapters. Now write it.

Tee Morris: The Fear Factor

Here there be guest post! This time by Tee Morris, talking about how the fear we all feel about our writing doesn’t go away just because you’ve published a book.

I never like seeing friends stressed out. Whether it is intensely stressed out or just out of their groove, it just kills me. It is amplified more when I personally feel the bumpy ride of Life’s rougher patches. Lately, those bumps have been feeling far too frequent for me; and it is very easy to lose yourself within the bad news and let it affect your work.

Getting published isn’t the hard part. It’s living up to the hype. Every time you clear one goal, another appears in front of you; and each goal is higher than the next.

There’s a lot riding on Dawn’s Early Light, the third book in the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences series, penned by Pip Ballantine and myself. At least, that’s what I’m seeing. The book hasn’t sold a single copy, and yet the fate of an award-winning steampunk series, potential titles under development, and even my own direction as an author all feels to be in the balance. Why, you may ask? As I was one told by a friend of mine:

“You got nothing to worry about. You ’ve arrived. ”

I have? Well shit, I must have missed that memo.

Sure, I have the previous performance of the series’ previous books, Phoenix Rising and The Janus Affair. They still manage to appear in Amazon’s Top 100 in Steampunk. It’s even better when these books pop up in the top 50 after three years. We have been working up a modest anticipation for Agents Books and Braun on Twitter, on Google+, and with a third season of our award-winning Tales from the Archives podcast. We also have a blog and podcast tour underway, appearing on over twenty blogs (including this one) and ten podcasts this month, all of these appearances heading towards the launch of Dawn’s Early Light.

So why the anxiety over this? We got this, right? This ain’t our first rodeo.

Actually, it is. At least, with Ace. Our publisher has made a gamble on us and on a series in progress. We have to make sure this gamble pays off. This is what it means to be a modern day author. Back in the day of Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen King — hell, even in the days of a young and spry (?) George R.R. Martin — the term R.O.I. never came into play.

It’s a different world now, kids. It would be nice to think you can follow in the footsteps of Uncle George and enjoy a few years between books, but you can’t and you won’t. You’re measured by your last book. Not only in how it performs but when it came out.

The clock continues to count down to release date, and I continue to try to keep a clear head amongst distractions like douchenozzles buying New York Times bestseller slots and the saber rattling over Independent versus Big Bad Legacy publishing. It’s enough to drive you to drink (and I enjoy my single malt over chilled rocks, thank you), especially when you have on the line details like a house, a child to take care of, and a career to pursue.

On one of the more intense days where I was getting particularly frustrated, Pip said it to me through my rant of frustration: “You can’t give up. You’re not allowed.”

Then it hit. And it’s still hitting me…

I’m scared.

I’m scared that Ministry won’t go the way people are telling me it will go. I’m scared the book will hit the shelves and people will hate it. I’m scared that I’ve got all these great ideas, but I’ll suddenly find myself unable to get beyond the pitch. I’m scared the Ministry is going to fall short of everyone’s expectations; and I’m scared, particularly on those days when I struggle to herd the words, of losing that ability to write.

There’s also that fear that I’m doing something wrong, or not doing enough, to make our latest title a success.

That’s what’s happening in my headspace, and it is tearing me apart.

I understand what Pip meant though. I’m not allowed to give up. These are First World problems, and I still have stories to tell. It may sound like I am miserable, but that’s not it either. It’s just that anticipation. I love what I do, but I know how I get right before a major release. I set a pace, and there are days when I feel I cannot keep that pace. I have to, though, no matter how bad it may seem. We as the upright mammals we have evolved (in spite of those damn Godzilla-bits in our brain) must always strive forward. Onward. Always.

But this terror. Sometimes, this darkness feels bigger than me.

This fear isn’t a bad thing though. It’s good. It keeps me focused and driven. I know that when I’m the most terrified, I’m sharp. My heart pounds like a jack rabbit as I hammer out a blogpost, before a speaking event, before a panel discussion, against words straining to get on the screen, and—from what I discovered at a writers’ retreat—introducing a new work amongst a roomful of peers. I know that I’m alive, and every rapid pound in my chest reminds me that I have earned the right to be here and it’s time for my “A” game. I am told by agents, editors, and publishers I have chosen a path that few undertake. I honestly don’t know what that means, but I do know that this fear is an acknowledgement of a challenge before me.

When that fear threatens, though, a friend of mine—a fellow storyteller named Phil Rossi—offers a perspective I can get behind.

“We are defined largely by our own perception. If I think I can ’t write, then I ’m not going to be able to do it.  If I consider myself capable of telling a good tale, then that ’s just what ’ll happen.  Belief is a powerful thing.  

And in this case, I ’d say it ’s magic. ”

In a perfect world, I believe that how we should be to each other: inspiring. That really is, as Queen once put it, a kind of magic.

Find your strength. Even when you believe you have none left, remember you do. It could be a loved one. It could be another writer. There is strength to draw from. Always.

I am ready to face it. I am ready to be a motherfucking rockstar.

In Writing, There Are Rules, And Then There Are “Rules”

Writing has rules. And writing has “rules.”

By which I mean, writing is beholden to two things:

Laws and guidelines.

Laws are mostly immutable. A period goes at the end of a sentence. Commas work a certain way. Words mean things. Grammar, punctuation, parts of speech, etc.

These laws grow more complex, of course. Byzantine, even. And the more complex they become, the more mutable they get — technically, you don’t put a preposition at the end of a sentence, but really? You can. And most do. You’re not supposed to use sentence fragments, either. But you can use sentence fragments to excellent effect: the short, sharp shock of information delivered. It can set a staccato rhythm. Just as deft use of a run-on sentence — also a technical no-no — can draw out rhythm and give your prose a purposefully meandering, stream-of-consciousness feel.

Guidelines are a different animal. They feel like laws and are often reported as such because it’s much easier and more interesting to yell YOU SHOULD NEVER USE ADVERBS instead of the more even-handed hey, maybe you should think very hard whether that adverb is necessary here because it might not be, okay? Never mind the fact that in the phrase “never use adverbs,” the word ‘never’ is actually a goddamn adverb, and so are lots of words you will use frequently like ‘now,’ ‘here,’ ‘there,’ ‘always,’ ‘yesterday,’ ‘everywhere,’ or even, ahem, ‘frequently.’ Writing advice is often about guidelines and not about laws, though, so many of the givers of advice (or shouters of advice) appear do so as if they are banging a gavel against the stone binding of a bonafide holy book. This is doubly more complicated when they begin to deliver storytelling advice, which is waltzing on ground that is as unstable as a field made of wadded-up jizz-tissues.

(Don’t even get me started on publishing advice. Yoinks.)

And I say all this as a person who quite clearly delivers a goodly bit of writing, storytelling and publishing advice weekly. I say this to remind you, in part, that what I say here is really just a suggestion — advice on par with how to how to brew coffee or how to perform a given sex-move. You do what you like. Different squeaks for different freaks.

Or: whatever makes your grapefruit squirt, you know?

Because every writer is a different animal. A mythic beastie whose mold was broken.

But herein lies the value of writing advice: these are things worth considering. Seeing how other writers do things matters. Just as the very nature of writing is not immutable, neither is your process, and neither is your grip on language, character, plot, story. Writing advice gets you to engage in the thoughtwork necessary to say, is my way better, worse, different, or what? It demands you ask, is there a way to improve what I’m doing, and is this way the way forward, or is it a step backward? It behooves you to pick up a tool and check its heft, its grip and its function before dismissing it entirely.

Learn the laws. Observe — and challenge — the guidelines.

Some writers violate the laws and guidelines because they never beheld them in the first place, in which case they’re not some bold explorer or given over to artistic experimentation. They’re just an orangutan with a paintbrush. (Sorry to any orangutans reading this blog.) If you use a chainsaw to perform dentistry, I’m impressed, but I’ll be a whole lot less impressed if after the act you say, “Wait, what’s a chainsaw?” Accidental genius isn’t easily duplicated.

I know that I’ve broken rules in my writing. I know that I’ve broken rules in this very post.

I know why I did it, too.

I have said before and I will say again here:

We learn the rules so that we may know when to break them.

We break the rules so that we know why we need them in the first place.

Learn your craft. Then make it your own.

 

Cursey McCursealot

It’s funny that people think I’m going to curse up a storm upon meeting them.

It’s understandable. I tend to be rather profane on this here blog (er, this here motherfucking bastard of a blog). I like to curse! Profanity is a circus of language. It’s a spoken world of dizzying trapeze jumps and exploding clowns and lions eating bears or whatever the hell happens at the circus (I haven’t been to the circus in a long while, shut up).

But I thought I should warn you, since this seems like it might be of some disappointment:

I don’t actually curse that much in person.

At least, not in polite company. Like, if I just meet you, I’m not going to be like, “WHAT UP MOTHERFUCKER” and then give you a wedgie. I’m not going to abrade you with my beard and say words like “shit-turkey” or “cock-spackle” or “fuck-sundae” unbidden. I’m certainly not going to get on a panel (where children might be present) and talk about, y’know, jizz or whatever.

As I grow more comfortable with you, I may pepper in a little profanity. And if we become truly close — like, my beard cilia begin to harvest your flesh — I may utter a steady stream of gibbered profanities from the Time Before Man into your ear in a ritual unlocking so that I may milk your pineal gland of all its wisdom and turn you into another one of my Wendigo-Puppets.

(AKA “Wendogs.”)

But, just to warn you: I probably won’t be all that cursey when we meet.

Probably.