Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 189

The NaNoWriMo Dialogues: “What An Excellent Day For An Exorcism”

Me: The time has come.

Me: Hello?

Me: Oh, Cripes.

*looks around the room*

*searches house*

*sends sentient drone flights*

You: HEY ALL RIGHT GET THESE TERMINATOR PLANES OUT OF MY ASS

Me: They’re not really in your ass. That’s a metaphor.

You: Well, one of them gave me a hemmorhoid. “Metaphorically.”

Me: Whatever. It’s time to come out of hiding. You don’t have to be scared.

You: Listen, we’re done. For me and soon everybody else, NaNoWriMo is NEARLY over, dude. That’s it. You can go. Your job here? Completed. Well-done. Round of applause. Now go away. Jerk.

Me: Captain Howdy, that isn’t very nice!

You: Ugh, blergh. Whaddya want?

Me: I want to talk next steps.

You: We talked next steps yesterday.

Me: No, there I threatened to kick your face into various shapes if you carpet bombed the publishing industry with your explosively-unfinished prose. Today I want to talk about the real next steps. I want to talk about editing. After all, January is NaEdYoShiMo.

You: Is that Japanese?

Me: No. It means: National Edit Your Shit Month.

You: OH YOU AND YOUR PERSISTENT VULGARITY.

Me: It’s in my genes, man. Get up close and personal with my DNA you see fuck and bastard and cockwaffle etched upon the helical chains, carved into the hydrogen bonds.

You: Okay, wait, so, if January is NaEdYoShiMo month, what is December?

Me: NaEscYoManMo.

You: National… Escargot Yo-Yo… Mantis Month?

Me: That makes so little sense it might be a heretical utterance used to summon a Great Old One. Nay, December is National Escape Your Manuscript Month.

You: It’s not chasing me. It’s not a swamp monster.

Me: Well, herein lies my first piece of advice: do not jump right from writing a book to editing a book if you can help it. We writers are the worst judges of our own work, particularly when we’re very close to it. Think about it. You’ve just gone ten rounds in the ring with this pugilist and while you won the fight, you’re beat to hell. Your head’s swollen like a cantaloupe. Your nose is streaming blood. The piss, shit, hell and fuck have all been knocked out of you. Now isn’t the time for a cold and clinical examination of how the fight went. Now’s time to sit down. Ice your big melon head. Pinch your nose to stop the bleeding. Step out of the ring and stay out of the ring.

You: While I admit I’m kinda afraid to edit, I’m also afraid to wait. It’s a scab I wanna pick. A broken tooth I wanna wiggle. IT’S A BEAR I GOTTA POKE.

Me: Right now, though, your creative wires are all crossed. You’ll hate stuff unfairly. You’ll love other passages unreasonably. You’ll despise stuff that works and adore things that don’t. Your brain’s gone all wibbly-wobbly lovey-hatey. Look, when you read a book written by Some Other Asshole, you can usually get pretty clear pretty quick on what you liked and didn’t like. What worked and didn’t work. Because, who cares. Not your book. You need to get to that phase with your manuscript. You need to get to the stage where it reads like Some Other Asshole wrote it. So: take the month of December off. Besides: December is crazytown with the holidays. Christmas isn’t just one day anymore, it’s a whole month of shopping and songs and pie and –

*eats pie*

You: Did you just eat a whole pie while I’m sitting here?

Me: MMGPH– no.

You: I feel like I just watched a snake eat a cat. You have a gift, my friend. So, what else?

Me: Editing tips?

You: Lay ‘em on me. I’m getting ready.

Me: Have a plan.

You: Like a Cylon?

Me: Yep. Like a Cylon. We like to imagine we edit a book the same way we write, but that’s not really true. Writing is lining up the pieces but editing is what we do to those pieces: we rearrange some, we throw a few away, we add a couple more, we destroy a few with a hammer, we cry on a few, we eat one, and we keep doing it until the arrangement is right. We also like to imagine that we’re going to tackle the whole thing in one go, but in my experience that’s rarely been the case. You can’t eat an elephant in one bite. Unless you’re Cthulhu.

You: Maybe I am Cthulhu.

Me: I know Cthulhu and you are no Cthulhu.

You: Jerk.

Me: Guilty. Anyway — to determine how you’re going to begin, it pays to get a sense first of what’s wrong. Which means reading the whole damn thing again. Just read it. Think about it. Take notes if you want to. What works? What doesn’t? Then, for me, I like to chart the book. I want to see its shape. Maybe that means re-outlining the book. Maybe that means taking new notes on the characters — identify their arcs in three or more beats. It could even mean literally drawing the shape of your story — is it really a simple Freytag’s triangle? Is it really three acts? Maybe it’s five. Or seven. Note the rise and fall of tension. Find the anagnorisis and peripeteia and the catastrophe that results. A lot of it is asking yourself questions.

You: Like, with what manner of fire should I burn this manuscript to ash?

Me: Ease off the mopey stick. No, I mean questions like, does the story move along fast enough? Do you get to the inciting incident quickly? Does the middle drag? Are all mysteries properly answers? Where are the plotholes and what will it take to spackle them over? Do the characters act believably, or do they feel enslaved to the plot? Does it all make sense? Writing the book, all you get is forest. Now you’re trying to see all the trees.

You: That’s a lot of questions.

Me: A book is a big thing. It’s not a concrete block. It’s a Rube Goldberg machine. Lots of moving parts big and small. Dongles and flywheels. Toothy gears turning larger gears turning larger gears still. A floppy dildo on a zipline strikes a boiling teapot which tips and brews a cup of tea whose weight disturbs the wolverine on which the teacup is perched and then the wolverine runs into the nearest Wal-Mart and — well, you see what I’m saying. Lots of mechanisms strung together. Character, plot, theme, tension, mystery, mood, emotional throughline, each piece affecting the other. You pick a part and then you wade into the fray with an axe for chopping, a scalpel for finer cutting, a paintbrush for erasing and flourishing, a pen to rewrite what you’ve lost — to fix what you’ve broken. And that doesn’t even account for the writing itself.

You: Oh, fuck me sideways with a Garden Weasel, there’s more –?!

Me: You bet your sweet baboons. Once you’ve actually gotten the story sussed out, then it’s time to attack the language. It’s time for the copy-edit. And there, again, language is a great big wacky machine and you’ll find yourself doing a lot of trimming, tightening, rewriting, firebombing. Lots of little things to look for, too.

You: Do I want to know?

Me: You do. Damn right you do. Here’ s a by-no-means-exhaustive list of stuff to look for. Ready?

You: No.

Me: Too bad. In no particular order, be on the hunt for: typos, misspellings, poor word choice, incorrect word choice, repeated words, awkward phrasing, run-on sentences, comma overuse, missing punctuation, repeated words, unnecessary adverbs, egregious dialogue tags, unnecessary adverbs connected to egregious dialogue tags, passive voice, lazy overuse of the verb ‘to be,’ junk words, trailing modifiers, broken subject-verb agreement, lack of parallel structure, busted-ass metaphors, broken rhythm, inconsistent word tense, inconsistent POV, fragments, shit that just doesn’t make sense, and so on, and so forth.

You: You said ‘repeated words’ twi — oh.

Me: Just making sure you’re listening.

You: That’s a lot of stuff. My head hurts.

Me: I can offer a few Stupid Writer Tricks to make it easier.

You: Lay it on me, Daddy.

Me: Don’t call me Daddy.

You: Mommy?

Me: Moving on. Tips: first, read your work aloud.

You: Like, theatrically?

Me: Mutter it for all I care. But speaking the story aloud allows you to catch things you might not “hear” while reading — after all, words on a page are simply proxy representations for the words we speak with our monkey mouths and also inside our own cave-like minds. Vocalizing your tale lets you listen for rhythm and flow. For speedbumps. For a loss of clarity. For redundancies.

You: What else?

Me: Look at the shape of the prose on the page. Uniformity is not your friend. If you turn the manuscript 90 degrees counter-clockwise, the prose should form mountains and valleys — peaks made of short, terse sentences coupled with hills of thicker, more robust text. Long sentences and short sentences make rhythm.  And the way you format your page matters, too.

You: I don’t follow.

Me: If you wrote the book in, say, 14-point Courier, change it to 12-point Times New Roman for the edit. Or print it out. Or adjust the margins. Shifting the physical parameters of your manuscript goes a good way toward making it feel like Some Other Asshole wrote it instead of you.

You: That’s genius.

Me: Thanks.

You: No, not you, I mean this funny list on Buzzfeed: “37 Shiba Inu That Look Like Tom Hiddleston Eating Bacon.” But your thing is genius too I guess.

Me: Uh. Th… thanks.

You: One more question. I’m told I should “kill my darlings.”

Me: That’s true.

You: My spouse and children and pets? I know a writing career takes sacrifices, but wow.

Me: What? No! No. Darlings inside the text. Which are sometimes erroneously described as parts of the work that you love unconditionally, which is really very bad advice. “Destroy what you love” is not good advice for storytelling. The darlings of your fiction are those things — be they passages, chapters, characters, whatever — that exist in the story only because you love them, not because they serve any purpose. They are precious. They are a bunch of peacocks whose only purpose is to preen and poop up your manuscript. Pretty. And shallow. Here’s an example of darling-murder from my own dubious writing career.

You: That helps.

Me: Excellent.

You: Fine. You’ve convinced me. I’ll take some time off. Then I’ll go edit.

Me: Stellar.

You: So, I guess we’re done here.

Me: Yeah. I guess we are. Tomorrow is Gorge Yourself On Big Dumb Birdmeat Day. NaNoWrimo crawls to a close over the weekend. So that’s it. That’s all she wrote. Congrats on finishing.

You: It wasn’t hard. I just wrote “poop” 50,000 times.

Me: That counts. It’s better than some novels I’ve read.

You: So, I won?

Me: Sure. Winning is kinda subjective, here. You might want to read this other thing I wrote about the idea of “winning and losing” when it comes to NaNoWriMo.

You: Yeah, no. I think I’m gonna go take a nap, instead.

Me: Fair enough.

You: Thanks for your help.

Me: Happy to oblige, Captain Howdy.

You: That’s that, then.

Me: It will be when the exorcist arrives.

You: A young priest and an old priest?

Me: Sounds like the start of a joke.

You: Yeah, well. What an excellent day for an exorcism, am I right? Now why don’t you come on over here and loosen these straps?

Me: Why don’t you make the straps disappear?

You: That’s much too vulgar a display of power, Wendig.

*vomits hell-barf*

Merch Sale: 50% Off Mugs And T-Shirts

You will note that I have a few items of Merch for sale here on the site.

This Merch tends to be of the “mug” and “t-shirt” variety.

I sell them using Zazzle.

And, hey, lookie lookie.

Today Zazzle is running a sale on GASP mugs and t-shirts.

So, if you procure any of the terribleminds merch items, and use the following code:

BLKFRIDAY983

You will get 50% off.

Also, if you’d like to see any other kind of merch on this site, lemme know, yeah? Anything from the site you’d like to see on a mug, t-shirt or Other Customizable Product, please plop down into the comments and say the word. Say thankee-sai.

The NaNoWriMo Dialogues: “Let Me Stop You Right There”

Me: Hey, whatcha doing? Doodling more dongs on all my books? Because that’s mature.

You: No. For your information, I’m planning my next steps with this novel, since the month is almost over and I will soon be scoring a bullseye on the ol’ 50,000 words target. Boom.

Me: Congratulations to you.

You: Thank you. I plan on celebrating.

Me: And what manner of celebration are you planning?

You: You know, I’m a writer, so, the yoozh — I’ll sit around in a dark room drinking hard liquor and laughing at all my jokes until I start crying.

Me: That’s a myth, by the way. One I admittedly persist in transmitting, but all writers are not drunks. Hell, some authors don’t even drink.

You: HA HA HA, SURE, GRANDPA.

Me: *stares hot iron pokers through your soul*

You: Fine, I’ll amend my celebration. I seem to recall Delilah Dawson said something about cupcake cannons, so I’ll head down to Party City and grab a couple of those badboys and fire off a 21-cupcake-salute. Red velvet. Right into my deserving belly. CHOOM CHOOM.

Me: So, liquor and cupcakes.

You: Breakfast of Champions, man. And then, soon as I shake off the hangover and the diabetes, it’s onto making this novel the bonafide motherfucking bestseller it is destined to be. That’s what I’m scribbling here — a list of agents and editors who –

Me: Whoa, whoa, whoa, Captain Howdy, let me stop you right there.

You: Wha? Wha’d I say?

Me: I — I just — whhh — vuhhh — muhhhh. MUHGRBLE NNNNGH no! No. No. Is your plan really to finish this book and then just start flinging your story-shaped poo-ball into the inbox of every agent and editor you have chosen to punish? As if they’re dung beetles awaiting your crap?

You: Well. Yeah?

Me: Oh, goddamnit.

You: Hey, now. That’s the whole point of this NaNoWriMo adventure, isn’t it? To write a book, then to get that book published. I mean, holy shit, I’m sure whatever I wrote is better than what Snooki wrote. I figure whatever she turned in was just a ream of papers coated in smeary bronze tanner Snooki-prints. Grumpy Cat gets a book deal. Guy Fieri is still allowed to put words inside of things and sell them to us. You know what I heard? The giant wrecking ball from the Miley Cyrus video has a book deal. I’m not kidding. It’s called, LIFE WITH CHLAMYDIA.

Me: That’s mean. You’re saying Miley Cyrus has chlamydia.

You: No, the wrecking ball caught it from unprotected sex with other wrecking balls. God, you’re very insensitive, you know that? Check your privilege, son. No, Miley Cyrus does not have chlamydia. She has, however, had her tongue replaced with an angry eel. Which is very sad that kids these days feel they need to have these procedures to feel cool and to fit in at –

Me: Just shut up. Shut your sugar hole. No more talky. We need to get back to this poison pill of a plan you’re trying to get me to swallow. Sending off your NaNoWriMo manuscript on December 1st is — to quote Chris Traeger, literally the worst idea you have ever had. Ever. Ever! Ever.

You: Even worse than the time I –

Me: This is not Family Guy. Stop that.

You: Ugh, blech, blergh, whatever. I wrote this fancy book and now I’m not supposed to do anything with it? Just sit on it like it’s a chair? You’re not my Dad. (Wait, or are you?) Whatever. Point is: I did the hard part. Now I need to reap sweet reward.

Me: The hard part. The hard part? The hard part?! Hey, hold on, I’m gonna laugh for 17 minutes.

*18 minutes passes*

Me: There we go. *wipes eyes, blows nose*

You: That was eighteen minutes.

Me: Well, turns out what you said was extra stupid. The hard part is not writing a book. That is actually the easiest part. Writing a book is the Play-Doh phase. It’s just you smooshing words together and screaming out ideas and making your action figure characters do shit and say shit. It’s a drunken clumsy race to the finish line. It’s inelegant. It’s the braying of a donkey. What comes next is not fill up this super-soaker with my word-vomit and hose down the publishing industry with it. What comes next is edit this thing into something resembling a great novel.

You: No, nope, mm-mm, I know what’s happening here. You’re just trying to keep me from competing with you. I know that agents and editors have a job and that job is to take my word-barf and delicately shape it into the flower it’s yearning to become.

Me: December 1st, do you know what agents and editors do?

You: Uh, celebrate all the sweet reads they’re about to get?

Me: They have an underground bunker in Greenbriar, West Virginia. They leave Manhattan in these shadowy buses and drive there. They don’t get to spend Christmas with family or friends, because they go to the bunker for the whole month. The bunker has concrete walls thick enough to withstand a howitzer shelling. They have a supply of food and water. They bring lots of books. Good books. Real books. But the most important thing they don’t bring is a goddamn internet connection because as soon as they jump onto the Information Superhighway they’re gonna get pulped into bloody asphalt treacle by the 18-wheeler mega-truck carrying a flat-bed stacked high with a million shitty NaNoWriMo manuscripts. It’s crazytown up in there. I hear last year they ran out of coffee and Hot Pockets and had to eat a few junior editors and agent interns.

You: So, this bunker — it has a mailing address? I can put together a SASE, which is technically a thing I don’t know, uh, what it is, but I assume it’s an artifact from the forgotten “VCR Epoch” of man that I still see on submission guidelines sometimes, so I’ll just whip one of those together and send it off as soon as you give me the –

Me: I’m not giving you the address. What I will give you is a kick to the face. I will kick you so hard, your face will mold around my foot and become a comfortable flesh-slipper. As I will not have a second slipper, I will then proceed to do the same to some other part of your body. Kidneys. Solar plexus. Ass. Genitals. Whatever. I will wear you as slippers, is what I’m saying, because increasingly, that’s all you’re good for.

You: You know what? The publishing industry doesn’t want my genius, fuck ‘em. Gatekeepers! That’s what they’re called, right? They’re like flying babies with flaming swords keeping the riff-raff out of Eden — oh, ho, ho, but we have built our own Eden called self-publishing. Boom. Done. Just click publish! *rips shirt off, starts to tattoo that phrase on chest*

Me: Sure, because that’s what the audience needs. Just piles and piles of garbage floating around their book-shopping experience. You know why I go to a store? To buy products curated by that store. I go to Target because I want to buy a loaf of bread from approved bread-providers, not because I want to look through a thousand different breads from a thousand different amateur hour bread-makers that range from, “Okay, this could be good” to “Oh, someone poured a half-pound of all-purpose-flour in a dirty gym sock and hit it with a flamethrower.” You don’t see a shitpile and go and shit on it in order to make it bigger, do you?

You: What if I do?

Me: Weirdo.

You: Well, somebody doesn’t like self-publishing.

Me: Hey, shut up. I love self-publishing. It’s a fantastic option. It’s changed everything. I just happen to like author-publishers who treat this thing as if they’re goddamn professionals. I like self-publishers who want to compete with traditional publishing instead of competing with rats in an alleyway fighting over a spent condom. And being professional means taking it through all the steps to make your book the best book it can become.

You: Ugh, god, fine. I won’t send it off to agents and editors. I won’t just stick it up on Amazon with this really cool MS Paint cover I did of a velociraptor making love to a helicopter. (Spoiler: it’s called RAPTORCOPTER.) I will wait. And I guess you’re going to tell me I need to blah blah blah edit my book so flippity floppity floo it doesn’t suck or something.

Me: Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to tell you. Repeat after me: writing is when we make the words, editing is when we make the words not shitty.

You: CHUCK WENDIG IS A GIANT POOP SOCK

Me: *kicks face, wears it like a slipper*

You: *whimper*

Me: Tomorrow, we talk about editing. Good day. I SAID GOOD DAY.

NaNoWriMo: On The Language Of Losing

I’ve come around to digging what NaNoWriMo does for the penmonkey breed, particularly having seen so many writers who have officially or unofficially ended up with published work based on their efforts during this most scribbly of months.

That being said, and this is something I talked about a bit on Twitter today: National Novel Writing Month takes the art of storytelling and the craft of writing and ladles across it a heavy shellacking of gamification. Which can work, to be clear — folks have found a great deal of value in applying a kind of social game code with attendant rules and conditions to everything from running to cooking to beer drinking.

When it works, it works.

The problem is, writing is a very peculiar, personal, persnickety endeavor — we all have our ways to do it and we further sometimes bind our hearts and minds up so deeply in the briar-tangle of wordsmithy that it becomes difficult to unsnarl our emotions from the whole thing. Which doesn’t lend itself well to to the game language that pervades the whole thing.

And thus enters one of my sole remaining concerns with NaNoWriMo, which is reliance on language like “winning” and “losing” as regards the month long novel-writing adventure. This isn’t a game of Monopoly, after all. It’s not a race in which one competes.

It’s writing a book.

As we round the bend, I’m starting to see people talk about how they’re going to “lose” — and that’s absurdist horseshit. Keep writing. NaNoWriMo is what got you started doing this thing, but it doesn’t have to be — and maybe shouldn’t be — why you finish it.

And so, it’s worth remembering:

If you finish your book on December 1st, or January 3rd or May 15th, you still won. Because HOLY SHIT YOU FINISHED A NOVEL. So few manage this epic feat that it’s worth a freeze-frame fist-bump no matter when you manage to actually stick the landing. The goal is to write a book whether it takes you one month or one year — failing to complete 50,000 words in a month that contains Thanksgiving and the ramp up to Christmas should never be regarded as a loser move.

Don’t worry about winning or losing. If it’s hurting your mindset, reject the gamification aspect. Hell, I could write my name 25,000 times and “win” the event. Or I could write 45,987 words of amazing prose that will one day be part of a bestselling novel and I’d still “lose.”

So, hang tight.

The calendar is not your prison.

NaNoWriMo is good when it helps you.

And when it hurts you, it should be curb-stomped and left for dead.

Your words matter. Whether you wrote 10,000 or 50,000 or 115,000.

Keep writing.

Finish your shit.

Completo el Poopo.

NaNoWriMo: The Last Week

Last week of NaNoWriMo, writerly humans.

And so, I’m here to ask:

How’s it going? How’d the whole month go? Was this your first time? Will this be your last? Comments, questions, complaints? Anything me or any other writers can offer by way of dubious and uncertain guidance? It’s a tough row for folks who haven’t done it before and who don’t necessarily write at this pace all year around, and November can be a pretty wonky month in terms of time — so, honest appraisals and serious questions, fling ‘em into the comment section.

Flash Fiction Challenge: 200 Words At A Time, Part One

Last Week’s Challenge: Find Your Favorite Opening Line

Administrative head’s up — still tallying which of the opening lines were used the most in the last challenge (unless, ahem, anyone feels like taking that bullet for me).

This week is going to be the start of a five-part challenge that should take us up to and through Christmas. This is a bit of an experiment, so, who the hell knows if it’s going to work? But it is what it is and hey, I wanna try this out, see what happens.

I want you to write the first 200 words of a story.

This will not be a complete story.

Again: this is just the start of a story.

This is, in fact, 1/5th of a story.

You will finish this by noon EST on the following Friday, which is the 29th of November.

Then — and I’ll remind you of this next Friday — you’ll take someone else’s 200 words and continue that story for 200 more (for a total of 400 words). The goal being to end up with a 1000-word story after five total challenges. Each time around you’ll grab someone else’s story and add 200 words to it. We’ll play this weird narrative whisper-down-the-lane variant until roughly the end of the year. So, for right now…

Post your 200 words at your blog.

Link back here. (That part is critical, obviously.)

You’ve got a week.

Go write!

Write What You Love, Or Write What Sells?

Got another email that spurned a response from me that I thought I might share, both because maybe it’s useful thought-meat for my fellow wordivores, but also because maybe you have a differing or more nuanced opinion you might share. The email below, and my response after:

Hey Chuck,

So a buddy and I have this ongoing debate with a group of our author friends.

The gist of it is: If you’re going to be a writer, what’s better? To write what you love and make money eventually… or to write what sells and support your dream right now.

So I thought I would ask an expert.

Your name came up because your work is pretty diverse, so in theory you would know a fair bit about how to earn a living from your writing. 

At any rate, I would love to get your opinion on the matter, and hopefully settle things once and for all.

Thanks very much.

And my YMMV IMHO response:

The truth is, every writer is going to come at this differently.

And no wrong way really exists.

A writer who cares first about money — not just in a “I want to buy a jetboat made of unicorn horn” greed-hungry way, but in a “I’d like to pay my mortgage regularly and occasionally afford things like meals and new shoes” — may choose to examine the market and see that certain things seem to sell well and other things don’t and then try to aim his arrow for the bullseye scrawled with dollar signs.

Another writer who cares about money in a secondary fashion — or even not at all — might instead choose to say, “Fuck that, this is my craft and my art and I’m going to write exactly what I want to write.”

Again: you’ve no wrong way forward. Famous artists like Da Vinci and Michelangelo worked on commission to create work for other people, but they brought themselves into the art whether that was what they wanted to create or not, leaving behind a legacy no matter the origin.

Other artists and authors have succeeded financially by acting without financial interest.

For my mileage, I think finding the way to do both of these things is the real magic trick. The shared space in the Venn diagram between STORY I WANT TO WRITE and STORY EVERYONE WANTS TO READ is the real miracle mile.

And I think the way you get into the space is by writing first what you want to write. When you write the thing that truly speaks to you — where you rip out your own heart and squeeze its blood on the page, where you smear your mind across the story in order to leave a slug’s trail of memories and arguments and ideas — you’re likelier to plant a more fertile garden, narratively-speaking. Write what you want, and you’ve a greater chance, I suspect, of putting passion and power into the characters and into the story. If you like what you’re writing, and you’re affected by it, you stand a greater chance to affect the audience in the same way. Surprise yourself. Make yourself feel something. Tell the story you want to tell.

That’s not to say you can’t engineer it a little the other way, too. Writers rarely have one idea, or one story, they want to tell. They often have hundreds, or thousands. I often say that the question you should ask an author isn’t “how do you get your ideas?” but rather, “how do you make them stop?” And so, from that overgrown garden of possibility you may choose to pluck the flowers that you think your readers will find most attractive. If young adult appears to be selling very well and one of your ideas is a young adult idea — well, there you go.

Further, you can take a genre or an idea or even a work-for-hire assignment that didn’t originate from you and still put yourself into it. You can still love what you write even if it’s something meant to support your dream right now.

At the end of the day, writing can be a way to make money. And pretty good money, too. But if money was your only concern I’d say — go be an accountant, a lawyer, a doctor, an assassin. Writing is an uncertain enough career that even trying to write for a market or chase trends is tricksy business and still offers you no guarantee. And so I lean more toward it being better to commit your desire to the page in order to write what you want to write first and foremost. Even if that means writing one thing that’s commercial, then writing another thing that’s more personal.

Don’t bend to the market. Make the market bend to you. Fuck chasing trends. Why not be the trend everyone else is chasing?

The Kick-Ass Writer’s Group Contest

Writer’s Digest / Amazon / B&N / iBooks / Indiebound / Goodreads

The Kick-Ass Writer is now karate-chopping its way around the world in bookstores all over this great multidimensional omniverse.

I have a handful of physical copies of this book and I’d like to give them away.

I want to give a bunch of them away, in fact.

I want to give a bunch of them away all at one time.

And here’s how I’mma do it: I’m going to give them to your local writer’s group. (I don’t have any rigorous definition of “writer’s group” in mind, to be clear.)

I’ll give one book to each of the members of your writing group — up to ten, anyway. (And I’ll send them to one point person in the group, not to all of you individually. Because I’m hella lazy.)

How you get this bunch-a-books is simple:

Send me a group photo of your writing group to terribleminds at gmail dot com.

One photo per group.

The photo can be of you guys doing anything, though obviously your goal is to amuse and impress me as if I am a bloated, sleepy emperor on a throne made of dead writers clapping his clammy palms together and muttering ENTERTAIN ME TINY PENMONKEYS DANCE TO STAVE OFF MY GRAVE ENNUI. *clap clap snore drool*

You get the idea.

I’ll devalue the books with my signature if you so desire.

This contest is only open to those in the United States, because I can’t really afford to send a giant box of books overseas. (Sorry, folks. MURRICA.)

I’ll close this contest on Friday the 13th of December at noon EST. I’ll pick my favorite that day and announce the following week. If we get enough awesome entries, I may consider a second prize — but I’ll wait until the contest’s end to see if it’s warranted.

Good luck. And please spread word about the contest — and the book!

Questions can be dropped in the comments below.

Muy danke.

*jetpacks out*

Ten Questions About Wild Card, By Jamie Wyman

I am geeked when someone I’ve been talking to on THE SOCIAL MEDIAS for a while suddenly up and has a book deal and then, holy crap, an actual book. Especially a book that maybe has origins from one of the terribleminds flash fiction challenges?! Holy crap! Such is the case here, and so I am very excited to have Jamie Wyman at terribleminds to talk about her new book, Wild Card:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

Who am I? I am the terror that flaps in the night. I am the Bee Girl. I am a college drop-out who bet it all on Blue Man Group. I am the mother-fucking Phoenix. Spinner of fire. Drummer of drums. The Pajamazon. Omnipotent despot to all things peachy. I am Jamie Wyman.

Ahem, sorry. Guess I got a little carried away. Anyway, I’m Jamie—aka Blue. I write stories. Some are scary. Some are twisted. Some are sweet or pensive. All of them have some element of humor to them. In my life I’ve been a waitress, teacher, fire spinner/eater, writer/director of a performance troupe, corporate shill, that girl who dances like a hippy at Dave Matthews Band concerts, and a stay-at-home mom. I prefer careers that mean I get to wear pajamas all day. I like chai and have an unholy crush on Tom Hiddleston.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Trickster gods are playing poker to win Cat Sharp’s soul. Her only help in winning it back is a deliciously snarky satyr. Wackiness ensues.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

One thing you need to know about me is that I love Trickster gods. Maui, Puck, Loki, Coyote, Anansi… all of ‘em. I’ve always loved the mythology surrounding them. Their fingerprints are all over my life. Just when you think something’s going your way, they throw in a plot twist. You can either freak out about it, or laugh and move on.

Anyway, several years ago I had the idea that I wanted a typical black-velvet garage sale painting of the trickster gods of various pantheons playing a game of Hold ‘Em. Since I suck at the whole painting thing, I decided to try to make this read with my medium: words.  So in 2011 I wrote a piece called “Ante Up” (for one of your flash challenges, actually) as a sort of proof of concept. The idea had legs and so I let it simmer a bit.

Around the same time I was toying with a character named “Candice Sharp” and wanted to do an urban fantasy story with her. Mainly I wanted a character named C. Sharp so I could play with musical elements. Eventually the ideas collided and I changed Candice to Catherine because I couldn’t stand the thought of a main character being called “Candy” at any time. Yes, the name “Cat” is ubiquitous in urban fantasy right now, but other reasons for the name change made themselves clear as I outlined the series arc. I decided to throw Cat into the middle of the poker game and bam: the story was born.

HOW IS THIS A STORY ONLY YOU COULD’VE WRITTEN?

It took a special kind of insanity to cook this one up.

For starters, I truly love these characters. Cat is quiet compared to Marius, but the whole gang talks to me… okay, Marius won’t shut up. It’s a miracle I get anything done with him going on and on and on about how awesome he is. But they play in my head and it’s so damn fun! I like watching them interact with one another. Torturing them—especially Marius—gives me immense joy.

Ultimately, though, this book comes from my reverence of myth and demented love of trickster deities. Pairing those figures with technomancy, Las Vegas and music came very naturally for me—I used to work for an agency heavily pimping vacations to the Strip. My tribe is mostly comprised of tech and gamer geeks, and I spent more than half of my life studying/playing/writing music.

This is a cocktail that comes from my own special brew of crazy. Sure, other people in the loony bin could probably put these things together to knit a potholder or something during arts-and-crafts time, but ultimately, my special sauce is my passion for all of the above. What you get out of that mixture of love, passion, knowledge and childlike schizophrenia is my voice. Accept no substitutes.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING WILD CARD?

Trusting myself to let go and just tell the damn story. That’s my biggest stumbling block when drafting a story…just diving in and swimming around, letting it happen. My brain is often my worst enemy. Once it starts shouting at me, the avalanche begins and confidence slides down to the seabed. It didn’t help that a few months prior to writing the rough draft my confidence had taken a pretty swift kick in the pink parts with a snafu with my previous agent suddenly leaving the biz without telling a soul. GOOD TIMES! With WILD CARD, getting back on the horse, trusting the process and letting the story happen was damn hard.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING WILD CARD?

This wasn’t the first novel I wrote, but WILD CARD is my publishing debut, so the things I’ve learned about making a word file into an actual factual book are legion.

From a writing standpoint, I’ve learned a lot with this book in terms of crafting a series. This is the opening act in a 5-story arc I call “Etudes in C#”. I’ve seen other authors succeed at their long game. I’m a huge fan of Babylon 5 (which is a master class in series writing). But, this was the first time I went into a project knowing not just where I wanted this story to go, but the others that spawn from it. There are many nuances to telling a fuller story over time and not giving away major reveals that this book helped me understand. Managing to keep the pacing of this story while juggling the events yet to come… yeah, that’s been a big thing. And that knowledge will continue to shift as I get deeper into the series.

I think the most important take-away for me, though, has been confidence. In the 2+ years I’ve been working on this book, my fraud complex has greatly diminished. That fear of being found out for the talentless, ass-dragging sea creature that I really am is no longer a daily—or even monthly—thing. I’ve grown to a place where I trust that I “belong” here. That I have written something worth reading.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT WILD CARD?

I fucking love these characters. Seriously, they are so much fun to have in my head. Catherine is a smart, flawed woman who loves her bacon and takes no bullshit. And she’s an unrepentant geek. She’s someone I’d hang with. Marius is, frankly, one of my favorite characters I’ve ever worked with. He’s snarky as hell, his Charisma modifier is through the roof and he’s got one hell of a monkey on his back. He makes Cat’s life difficult and in turn I give him no end of shit. Then there’s the pantheon of gods I get to play with. And a ginger technomancer with his own secrets. Everyone in this book is so colorful and loaded with their own backstories, mythologies and foibles that they make writing them a true joy.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

Take Frankie’s advice and relax. Even with another novel and more stories under my belt since I wrote WILD CARD, I still need to chill the fuck out and just be in the drafting moment. I’m an editing fiend and I *do* enjoy story creation, but I can tell a difference between the results of when I’m writing tense (always looking for what’s wrong or questioning it) vs when I’ve written loose and fearless. Gotta be more like the Dude.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

 “And all I have to do is push,” he said.

I felt the sting of something pricking my belly and looked down to see that Marius had drawn his sword. Its point puckered the fabric of my T-shirt, blade gleaming wickedly in the moonlight. Gulping down a ball of fear and sucking in my stomach, I pulled my eyes back up to meet his. His expression didn’t waver.

“Do I have your attention?” he said with a simmer.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

Well, within the C# universe, I’ve got some work to do. Book 2 is done and ready to be pitched to the publisher. Book 3 is at about the 50% mark. Books 4 & 5 are sketched. There are some shorts in that playground, too. One is finished, another is still cooking in brain juice.

Outside of that, I’ve got a few short projects that I’m shuffling around. Also working on my first comic—a collaboration with artist Emma Lysyk (www.emacartoon.com). Other stories begging me to write them include a Steampunk Wizard of Oz book, a piece centered on a hospice chaplain, and another that takes place at Porn Star Fantasy Camp. I’m a busy girl.

Jamie Wyman: Website / Twitter

Wild Card (out 11/25): Amazon / B&N

 

NaNoWriMo Dialogues: “This Is The End! (Well, Almost)”

You: I feel like I’m staring down the barrel of a gun.

Me: Oh, sorry about that. *puts gun away* It’s just a pellet gun, jeez.

You: No, I mean metaphorically. With this book.

Me: I don’t follow.

You: Well, it’s Day 20. I’ve got about 15,000 more words to go. I’m rounding the bend on this thing. I think I’m almost done. Maybe. Sorta. Kinda.

Me: Still not getting the problem.

You: I HAVE TO END THIS THING. Sooner! Rather than later! Gah!

Me: Ohhh. You don’t know how to end it.

You: Yeah, yes, exactly. Like, in video games, landing a plane is already a whole lot harder than the “taking off and flying around” part. I have to bring this thing in for a landing without everything going all SPLODEY FIREBALL. Can I just keep it up in the air? Maybe I’ll keep flying this thing for another 50,000 words. Or 100. Or forever and ever this book will never end. I can write a 10-book epic fantasy cycle that has no actual narrative breaks, right? That’s doable?

Me: Robert Jordan did it. Well. Maybe not. I guess he kinda died in the middle.

You: Too soon, man. Too soon.

Me: It wasn’t a joke, it was — oh, never mind. Listen, bringing this story in for a landing won’t kill you. Or kill your book because, duh, you can always come back and rewrite things. Just the same, you’ve gotta keep some shit in mind.

You: All right. School me, Dumbledore. I am your Jedi.

Me: What? Never mind. You’re about to enter what is narratively considered to be the third or final act of your work. Now, any act structure is ultimately artificial — whether it’s three or five or a hundred-and-fifty-four acts, we like to think of our story architecture as being rigid and perfectly defined, but it isn’t. We’re not building the narrative out of oaken beams and whale bones. We’re building them out of thoughts and ghosts, out of ideas and arguments, out of the hopes and dreams and fears of characters that never existed. It’s a teetering tower made of marshmallows and monsters. So, trust me when I say: the act structure is very wifty, wonky, and wibbly-wobbly. Just the same, there’s gems to mine in those dark spaces.

You: I don’t know what any of that means.

Me: It means, the third act is you rounding the narrative bend. It’s a time of high stakes and terrible transformation. Here, the story pivots hard and the characters have to navigate the shift.

You: I feel like you’re just saying things. Just babbling writey-toity buzzwords at me.

Me: It sounds like that, but let’s talk some examples. Like, in the movie –

You: Oh, Christ on a crumbcake you’re going to talk about Die Hard again.

Me: … was not.

You: Really?

Me: Really.

You: What were you gonna talk about then?

Me: Uhh. Mmm. Whhhhhuhhh. Mac and Me.

You: The fuckin’… McDonalds-sponsored junk-foody E.T. rip-off. With the wheelchair scene. With the alien with the butt-crack head and the blowjob mouth.

Me: Yep. Yes. *coughs into hand* … Yes. Yeah.

You: Okay, let’s hear it.

Me: So, in the third act of the film, the alien — who, ahh, wants to save his alien wife — has been battling German terrorists all along, but now, now, the conflict dial is turned up to 11 as McC… as Mac the Alien loses the detonators, discovers the plan for the hostages, has to battle the FBI in addition to Gruber’s men, and worst of all, his own children are the signal that shows Hans Gruber that Holly Gennaro is actually Mrs. John… er, Mrs. Mac the Alien.

You: You just — that’s the plot of Die Hard.

Me: Nuh-uh. Nope. Not — okay, you know, I see how you’d think they were similar, but no, two, ennnnh, two totally different movies.

You: Have you ever even seen Mac and Me?

Me: …

You: Seriously.

Me: Well.

You: Fess up.

Me: Jesus, has anybody seen that movie? No! I haven’t! We’re talking about goddamn fucking Die Hard now because it’s an easy example and also an awesome one and SHUT UP YOUR FACE.

You: Fine, go ahead with your Die Hard horse-hockey.

Me: Yay! Anyway. The third act of Die Hard is an amazing example of escalation. It’s complications piled upon complications. Everything gets a whole lot more urgent as the danger needle spikes and McClane’s chances at overcoming his problem fall off a cliff. Or, more appropriately, over the edge of a skyscraper.  Things go from bad to holy goatfucker shitbomb we’re all fucked. He’s about to lose his life. About to lose his hostages. About to lose his wife. The bad guy is gonna win! In McClane’s John Wayne-flavored universe, that’s a no-can-do, motherfucker. But it’s not just in that movie. A lot of movies have this sense of high-octane complication. In the third act of of Star Wars, Obi-Wan dies and the Death Star follows Luke home to the rebel base like an angry dog. At the end of Empire, we lead into the betrayal at Bespin, the carbonation (erm) of Han Solo, the fact that Luke abandons his crucial training to go run off and confront Vader where we get the most epic hard pivot: Darth Vader telling Luke that, yep, he’s actually Papa Skywalker. Really, just look at any ending you’ve liked — whether it’s from a book, a movie, a game — and try to figure out why it felt satisfying to you.

You: Okay, but how do I actually engineer that?

Me: Newsflash — you’ve been engineering this all along.

You: Wuzzat now?

Me: I mean, you’ve been introducing elements all along. Conflicts. Problems. Failed solutions. Enemies. These are your pieces. You’re playing a chess game against your protagonist and she’s the king alone on the board and these are all the pieces that remain for you to use against her.

You: She’s a king? You’re confusing me. Why do you sometimes use the female pronoun?

Me: Because I don’t assume all characters — or writers, or editors, or whatever — should be men.

You: Okay. Carry on.

Me: Look at it this way: you know the idea of Chekhov’s Gun? You introduce a gun in the first act it better fire by the third act? That’s just a metaphor. That’s a metaphor for everything you introduce in the first two acts. Every aspect of the narrative is a gun on the table — and the third act is when you fire them all. Preferably at the protagonist.

You: So, what you’re saying is that, everything that goes into the third act has been in the story all along. Meaning — this is not the time to introduce new stuff?

Me: Correct. Not a great time to introduce new (unrelated) conflicts, new characters, new mysteries. The first two acts is you letting snakes out of a bag. The final act is you killing them. You set up dominoes: now it’s time to knock them down.

You: How do I make it satisfying, though? Like, how do I craft an awesome ending that everyone will love and they’ll give me pony rides through the town square and throw Kit-Kats in my mouth from great distances?

Me: You don’t. Blah blah blah, can’t please everybody.

You: Yeah, yeah. I mean — how do I make it work for the people who have been enjoying the book thus far –? I don’t want to let those folks down.

Me: This is real threading-the-needle stuff, trust me. Ending are tricky widgets. The last act of your work needs to a) feel like an ending nobody expected while also b) feeling like the only ending that could’ve ever happened. You’ve got to both surprise them and also give over to expectations. You’re Danny Torrance at the end of The Shining, leaving footprints that you will walk back over, fooling your isolation-mad daddy into frozen death there in the heart of the hedge maze. It’s like, at the end of Se7en we’re all surprised to find Paltrow’s head in the box, and yet — it all adds up, doesn’t it? It culminates the grand plan of John Doe. Even at the end of Die Hard –

You: oh christ

Me: — you get all these great surprising moments. The gun stuck to his back with fucking Christmas tape and blood. The helicopter exploding. The broken window. Hans falling. McClane punching out the bad guy from Ghostbusters. It’s not just plot stuff. This is all primo John McClane, baby. All this stuff confirms who we think he is and yet, at the same time, takes it over the top to show us even more.

You: This sounds hard.

Me: It is. Endings are hard. But a good ending should have momentum. You’re solving mysteries. You’re answering riddles. You’re forcing the good guy to deal with the bad guys. You’re forging romance or breaking hearts. You’re taking the theme you’ve had in play all along — meaning, the argument you’re making or the big question you’re asking — and you’re either confirming it or denying it. Most important of all, you’re bringing the journeys of all the characters to a close. In a way that’s compelling and curious and exciting and heartbreaking and triumphant for the reader as much as it is for the characters. Let the characters lead, even at the end of things.

You: I can do this.

Me: Even if you can’t, that’s why Jesus invented “editing.”

You: Cool. Smell you later, Dumbledore.

Me: Hasta la vista, Mac and Me.

*both fall off the cliff in wheelchairs as an alien looks on, confused*