Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 203

Flash Fiction Challenge: The Plot Scenario Generator

Last week’s challenge: Last Lines First.

This random plot scenario generator cracks me up.

And it also comes up with some pretty good narrative seedlings, to my surprise.

So! This week, we’re using it.

Go click the link.

Conjure a random plot scenario.

Use said plot scenario as the basis for your flash fiction challenge this week. You have, as always, up to 1000 words. Post on your space, link back here. Due by Friday, July 26th. (And as a note: please do not post entire stories in the comment sections. I delete those.)

Now click, think, and write.

So, You Just Had Your Book Published

(I thought about doing this post as a series of animated GIFs, but by golly, I am a writer – I am not your dancing GIF monkey. *makes harrumphy noises and frowny faces*)

So, you just had your book published.

And you want to know what’s going to happen now.

Here is — roughly, potentially, maybe — one scenario.

For a variable amount of time, let’s call it a week, you’re going to be flying high. Hell, flying high doesn’t even cover it. You’re going to be flitting around the big blue heavens with a pair of magical laser dolphins as shoes. You’re going to be past the moon. You’re going to feel like you’re snorting comet dust and making sweet love to asteroids.

Because you wrote a thing.

And now that thing is really for real a really real thing.

Like, holy shitsharks, it’s a book. That you wrote. That people can buy!

This is the best thing ever.

(That is not going to last. Your first high is always your best high.)

When you’re not vibrating through floors and walls, you will do things in support of your books. You will write guest blogs. And you’ll go to bookstores to sign books. You’ll tweet about it, or say things on Facebook. Maybe you’ll make a book trailer. Maybe you’ll do some interviews. It’s still exciting! You wrote a book! You birthed it out of your head-womb! This squally word-baby needs your love and the love of everyone around you!

But the feedback loop isn’t as robust as you’d like.

The guest blogs you wrote maybe don’t get as many comments as you would have imagined. Or the tweets about your book haven’t been retweeted as far and as wide as you might have hoped. You did a book reading and only three people came. Or hell, thirteen. Or thirty. Is it enough? You don’t know. You don’t even know if this stuff has an effect. Is it just you belching into the abyss? Throwing words into the void? Again you ask: is any of this enough? 

And you start to wonder: well, shit, what is enough? You don’t know.

How’s the book doing? Is it selling? You literally can’t tell. You don’t have enough information. So you start trying to suss out information. You go to the bookstore. Maybe they have plenty of copies on the shelves which is good, until you realize that maybe it means they haven’t sold any. Or maybe they have no copies which could also be yay but could also be oh shit they never ordered any in the first fucking place.

So, you go and look at your Amazon ranking. Which is a number that has almost no discernible meaning, and yet you stare at like it’s a Magic Eye painting where eventually you’ll see the image bleed through the chaos. You try flicking the number on the screen with your finger like maybe you can make the number jump up — tap tap tap – until you realize you want it to jump down, not up, and then you wonder if you’d be better off sacrificing a pigeon or a lamb or at the very least attempting to divine some news about your book from the guts of said pigeon or said lamb. You know people are buying the book and so you do another promotional salvo and three hours later the number increases, it gets bigger, which means it’s going the wrong fucking way, and in three hours it gets bigger again like it’s a snake that just ate a heavy meal.

Then you see there’s an Amazon Author Ranking, which is a number that may not be hooked up to anything at all, but it purports to place you in some kind of Penmonkey Hierarchy, some Authorial Thunderdome where you aren’t a champion, where you aren’t within 1000 miles of a champion, and where you are in fact sandwiched between the author of How To Avoid Huge Ships and some algorithmic spam-bot biography of the guy who played Potsie on Happy Days.

Ah, so, time instead to look at reviews, because even if you don’t know how many copies you’re selling you can at least see what people think. And the reviews might be glorious — readers have written epic paeans to your wonderful book and authorial presence and for one fleeting moment it’s like you’re back huffing comet juice and banging meteors with those magical laser dolphin shoes until – until! — you see that someone has written a one-star review, or worse, a completely milquetoast mediocre review where they say such awful things about your book. They take to task your voice, your characters, your plot, your face, your fashion sense, your very existence, and it’s like someone flung a booger into a perfectly good bowl of ice cream. Because no matter how good that ice cream was, now it is utterly booger-fucked.

After a few weeks you can at least start to see Bookscan numbers through Author Central at Amazon. And the numbers are, you know, they’re not great. You’ve at least sold some! So that’s good. Though they’re reportedly way inaccurate. And they don’t show Kindle numbers. And they don’t show Amazon’s own sales numbers for physical copies because while Amazon is happy to give you other people’s numbers their numbers are a trade secret HA HA HA STUPID AUTHOR.

The news isn’t helping. Barnes & Noble has decided that the only thing the Nook is good for is to sell to North Koreans to control the nuclear missiles that will eventually irradiate the Californian coast. JK Rowling published under a pseudonym and only sold like 400 copies which sounds bad except then you realize it’s really good and you haven’t sold 400 copies and oh, shit.

And then you start to look to see how other authors are selling compared to you, and fuck-me-sideways-with-a-set-of-horsehead-bookends that is not a good idea. Even if you’re selling well, somebody’s always doing better. They have more reviews, more fans, more “to-be-reads” at Goodreads. Then you’re gonna find that one self-published author with the ugly book cover and the misspelled book description who’s probably outselling you by a margin of 137 to 1 and so that night you soothe yourself by reading a good book and suddenly you’re all like oh shit this book is way better than mine I’m fucked my book is fucked we’re all fucked this is the fucking bookpocalypse for me fuck fuck fuckable fuck.

But you calm down. You got an advance. You have money. Book money, as a matter of fact, which is money you made from selling books which you used to buy dinner or pay some bills. And that’s exciting! Okay, it’s not as much money as you once thought it would or could be — hell, even a low six-figure book deal on three books (one book per year) is like, barely cutting it financially. But you made money. On your writing. You breathe. You scrub the panic urine spots out of your office chair. And then maybe some other good news trickles in: an agent just sold foreign rights for your book to some distant country — Libya, or Ancient Hyperborea, or Canada. Maybe there’s an audio rights sale. Or an options sale for some guy who wants to write the script so it’ll be an episodic YouTube smash sensation.

And you start to get emails here and there — people have read the book and they liked it. Some people have loved it. Those emails are kite-string and and a strong wind — they lift you, buoy you, send your spirits maybe not quite as cosmically high as they were, but you’re still doing barrel rolls and loop-de-loops in the clouds now and again.

So you do what you must. You do what you’re made to do.

You sit back down and you start writing the next fucking book.

And you love it. And you hate it. And the days come where you want to throw it all on top of a giant garbage fire. And the nights come where you secretly remember why you love what you’re writing and your heart pinballs around the bumpers and flippers inside your soul.

You soon are reminded that you can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank one.

And you realize that you can’t manufacture luck, but you can maximize your chances.

You write the next book. And the next after that. And the one after that.

Somewhere along the way you realize that the happiness of publication is fleeting. The second published book isn’t quite as exciting as the first, maybe. It’s chasing the dragon. The first high remains the craziest and best high. But what happens is, you get to be okay with that.

Because at some point you recognize that this isn’t why you write.

This isn’t why you tell stories. You tell stories because you like to tell stories, not because you like to sell books. That’s what gets you through. You marvel at the craft. You drown in the art. You roll around in it like a dog covering himself in sweet, sweet stink. It’s not that you don’t care about being published. It’s not that the money is meaningless. The money is a lifeline. The money lets you do this in a bigger, more real way. But all the publishing piffle — the Amazon rankings, the guest blogs, the tweets and marketing and Kirkus reviews and drinking and existential dread — it’s all out there. It’s extra. It’s connected to it, but it’s not it.

You do it because you love it.

You do it because you want to be read.

You tell stories because you’re a storyteller. And because stories matter.

And so whether you sell four million copies or whether you sell forty, you keep going. You keep taking your shot. You keep writing your books, your comics, your movies. You write shorts and novellas and you publish some stuff traditionally and you publish other stuff directly and you find satisfaction not in the high of putting books out but in the power of doing what you do, day in and day out. It is the work that sustains you: the work of taking a dream and making it real.

You don’t write to be published but rather, you write to write, and to be read.

Because that, for really real, is the truly best thing of all.

25 Things To Know About Your Story’s Stakes

1. Story As Game: Why Stakes Matter To Us

Storytelling isn’t a game, except when it is. Part of what keeps us coming back to play a game is part of what keeps us coming back to read a story. In a game, we want to beat the odds, duck the punches, cut the balls off our enemies, and play the royal flush to win the pot of gold coins from that shitty little leprechaun — and in that game, we are frustrated by conflict and lost battles and that can push us to play again with greater verve and viciousness. A story isn’t quite so straightforward, but the analogs are there: we see the protagonists and we want them to beat odds, duck punches, cut balls, and steal from shitty little leprechauns. We are further frustrated by the conflicts and the lost battles and so we read on with faster flips of the page.

2. Win, Lose, Or Draw

As in a game, it is crucial we know what is to be gained or lost in the battle or during the journey. Literally, what is at stake? Life? Love? Money? A precious plot of land? The loyalty of an old friend? A wish? A curse? The whole world? Galaxy? Universe? All of time itself trapped in a magic snowglobe held in in the paws of a jaunty hedgehog? Further, what are the conditions of victory? What will mean loss? These don’t need to be perfectly clear (nor must they be correct), but both reader and character should be able to guess at them, even if the guess is wrong.

3. The Stakes Damn Well Better Matter To The Characters

The characters are the engine that drives any story, and if the stakes don’t mean shit to the characters, the story becomes artificial — a cardboard story blown over in the most inconsequential of breezes. Why do they care? If they don’t give a damn, why will we?

4. Wants, Needs, Fears

If we envision the stakes as that which pins the characters to the story, we can further conjure more metaphorical story-whimsy and assume that the cord that tethers them to the stakes are their wants, needs, and fears. Every character has these: Victor fears the loss of his child. Henrietta wants nothing more than to get home and watch the new SyFy original movie, EELVALANCHE. Bob needs bath salts. For Victor, the stakes stop there: as the detective battles his nemesis, the space-rending godborn serial killer known as John Henry Zeus, his son is kidnapped and so his fear — and the stakes surrounding that fear — are made manifest. Henrietta’s stakes go deeper than her professed want: by not seeing Eelvalanche, she won’t have anything to talk about at work tomorrow, and the jerk she likes, Dave, won’t respect her, and she’ll continue on feeling alone and loveless with her house of cats. Henrietta’s stakes are a complicated, tangled skein of yarn. Bob, on the other hand, wants bath salts, and if he doesn’t get them, he’ll eat your face. In that story, there’s your stakes: BOB GONNA EAT YOUR FACE. Then again, once he gets his bath salts, he’s probably gonna eat your face anyway, so.

5. Chart The Stakes For Individual Characters

Every character won’t necessarily gain and lose the same things in a story. What’s fascinating is when you pit the stakes of one character against the stakes of another (and one might argue this is exactly what creates the relationship between a protagonist and an antagonist). A gain for one is a loss for the other. The expert thief Billy Bold wants to steal Picasso’s lost painting, The Monkeys of Pamplona, as his last score so he can leave the money to his daughter before he dies of face cancer. But Detective Jane Jermagernsern knows she’ll lose her job and her pension if she can’t catch Billy before he pulls off the heist. Their stakes oppose one another.

6. Personal And Internal Versus Impersonal And External

Stakes can be internal/personal — meaning, they relate directly to the character herself and her emotional investment in the story’s stakes is what’s on the line. Stakes can also be impersonal/external — meaning, they relate to a larger conflict involving but also well-beyond the character’s nature and demeanor. A smaller (and/or more literary) story likely has at its core stakes that are personal and internal (“If I don’t quit drinking, I’m going to die”). Genre work may focuses more on impersonal and external (“The fate of the Royal Galactic Star Imperium is in my hands!”). If you want my opinion (and if you don’t, why are you here?!): a mix is best.

7. The Small Story Is Larger Than The Big Story

It’s all well and good to have some manner of super-mega-uh-oh world-ending stakes on the line — “THE ALPACAPOCALYPSE IS UPON US, AND IF WE DON’T ACT LIKE HEROES WE’LL ALL BE DEAD AND BURIED UNDER THE ALPACA’S BLEATING REIGN” — but stakes mean more to us as the audience when the stakes mean more to the character. It’s not just about offering a mix of personal and impersonal stakes — it’s about braiding the personal stakes into the impersonal ones. The Alpacapocalypse matters because the protagonist’s own daughter is at the heart of the Alpaca Invasion Staging Ground and he must descend into the Deadly Alpaca Urban Zone to rescue her. He’s dealing with the larger conflict in order to address his own personal stakes.

8. Stakes Tied To, But Different From, Goals And Conflicts

Let’s say I’m having a dinner party. My goal is to cook dinner and have a successful party. It’s a pretty straightforward goal. The stakes are all the consequences of me meeting, exceeding, or falling short of my goal. It’s all the stuff attached to but outside the goal. If I fuck up the dinner party, your happiness during those two hours is on the line. So too is my social standing. And my own happiness and success. And maybe your physical health just in case I forget that I’m not supposed to jizz in the bean dip. The conflicts are all the things that block me from my goals and put the stakes at risk. The oven breaks. I burn the potatoes. The blender gains sentience and tries to eat my hands. The Devil shows up as an unexpected party guest. You know: the usual.

9. What This Means For Plot

We like to talk about plot as if it’s this thing that the storyteller installs into a story — but that’s like trying to install a person’s skeleton after they’re already born. The plot is an integral, organic part of the story; it grows as the story grows. Plot is people. Or, more specifically, plot is the result of characters making choices and acting on those choices. Or, even more specifically, plot is the expression of characters aware of the stakes and who form goals in response to those stakes (correctly or incorrectly) and who attempt to overcome conflicts in service to those goals. It gets more complex than this, of course — but we’ll talk more about that in a sec.

10. Stakes Force Choice

Put a different way, it’s important to see how the story’s stakes — meaning, what’s on the line for the characters or even the world — force choices from the story’s characters. Consequences are in play. Things are in flux. Risk is mounting. Goals must be formed. Choices must be made.

11. Dial Up The Stakes, Tighten The Tension

The larger the payout, the greater the threat, the higher the stakes. And the higher the stakes, the greater the tension for the characters — and, by proxy, the audience.

12. Positive Stakes: The Win

A story with positive stakes suggests that a successful outcome will be a gain: victory over the bad guys, a magic sword, a big score, romantic love, a fire-breathing ice-farting hell-pony.

13. Negative Stakes: The Loss

A story with negative stakes suggests that a successful outcome will merely be avoiding further loss or exploring/exploiting the losses that have already happened: forestalling the apocalypse, solving a murder, killing a mad king to end his reign, revenge over a bag of stolen Funions.

14. A Complicated Tapestry

Many stories are a combination of positive and negative stakes — a mix of win and lose conditions. Game of Thrones is an excellent example of this: we have a mix of “I want to be the king!” versus “The kingdom is in danger by outside forces!” Some characters are trying very hard to gain, whether they’re gaining the throne or a bride or just big bags of sweet Westerosi gold. Others are trying to stave off White Walkers or frankly just fucking survive (because man, life in Westeros is just one iron-gloved nut-punch after the other). Game of Thrones offers a wild mix of stakes on the line — positive and negative, internal and external.

15. Escalating The Stakes

In a poker game, you may be called to pony up more cash to stay in the game, and that’s true of storytelling, too. As the story goes along, you put more on the line. More to win. More to lose. Bigger reward. Higher risk. Sometimes we escalate the stakes so much that by the end it appears that the protagonist must succeed with an unwinnable hand — which challenges both storyteller and audience with a sucker-punch made of pure tension. “You thought you were just fighting to save your life? Now it’s the life of your daughter. Oh! Now it’s all of Los Angeles. NOW IT’S THE ALPACAPOCALYPSE.” *bleat bleat bleat*

16. Complicating The Stakes

We can escalate stakes by complicating them and we have at our disposal many ways to cruelly complicate those stakes. A character can complicate the stakes by making bad choices or by making choices with unexpected outcomes (“Yes, you killed the Evil Lord Thrang, but now there’s a power vacuum in the Court of Supervillains that threatens to destroy the Eastern Seaboard you foolish jackanape.”) Or you can complicate the stakes by forcing stakes to oppose one another — if Captain Shinypants saves his true love, he’ll be sacrificing New York City. But if he saves the millions of New York City, he’ll lose the love of his life, Jacinda Shimmyfeather. Competing complicated stakes for characters to make competing complicated choices.

17. Changing The Stakes

You can change the stakes as you go. The character may resolve a conflict and thus “cash out” one set of stakes (something lost and/or something gained). A show like Breaking Bad puts this into play quite nicely (uh, spoiler warning, 3… 2… 1…): at the fore of the series, the stakes are Walt’s life and his family’s finances thanks to his costly and debilitating lung cancer. But fate and his burgeoning meth empire (“methpire?” or is that a meth-addled vampire?) answers the problem and grants Walt a clear win — the cancer is gone, his bills are paid. But new stakes always fill the vacuum of the old: now the stakes are his family, his freedom, his “business,” and most troubling of all, his wildly spinning moral compass.

18. Never, Ever Remove The Stakes

If you remove the stakes from the story, it’s like stealing food from a toddler. It’s like smothering a pretty little kitten with a pillow. Removing the stakes robs a story of tension — it guts it of its urgency, it thieves the narrative impulsion from the characters and the audience. It’s a flabby floppy body with no bone, no muscle. Don’t suck the oxygen out of the room. Don’t make Story Hulk angry. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. Because then he’ll tell you a really boring story, then beat you to death with a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

19. Sub-Plotty Stakes

A series of lesser stakes involving the protagonist or the supporting characters can be used as the basis for sub-plots inside your story. And sub-plots are, of course, plot threads that have to do with submarines. *is handed a note* I mean, sub-plots have to do with the obtaining of submarine sandwiches *is handed another note* JESUS FINE, I mean, sub-plots are smaller storylines that weave in and out of the main plot. *is handed a final note* Aww, I love you too.

20. Think About What’s At Stake In Each Scene

Stakes smaller than those able to prop up subplots — let’s call ‘em “micro-stakes” — can instead be used to support a scene. When entering a scene, you should ask: “What are the stakes here?” The characters in any given scene are here in the scene consciously or unconsciously trying to create a particular outcome for themselves or for the world around them. Something is on the table to be won or lost: a dinner date, a sexual encounter, a piece of critical information, a phial of enchanted tears from a constipated elf. The stakes needn’t be resolved by the end of the scene, and may carry forward to other scenes, but do enough of this and you might start seeing one of those sub-plots I was talking about…

21. Hell, Let’s Throw Dialogue In There, Too

Dialogue can also have stakes. In real life we communicate for all kinds of reasons — to fill the air with sound, to shoot the proverbial shit, the relay a few quick details about shopping lists or bowel movements — but fiction isn’t meant to necessarily encapsulate that kind of dialogue. Dialogue in a story is purposeful: it’s conversation held captive and put on display for a reason. Dialogue in this way is frequently like a game, a kind of verbal sparring match between two or more participants. Again: things to lose, things to gain. Someone wants information. Or to psyche someone out. Or to convey a threat. Purpose. Intent. Conflict. Goals. Steaks on the table. *is handed another note* FINE I MEAN STAKES GOD YOU’RE SO ANNOYING

22. More On The Line Than The Characters Realize

Dramatic irony is when the audience knows something one or several characters do not. The stakes can be a part of this equation and this can significantly increase tension – we know that if the character doesn’t Unscramble the Widget and Decipher the Cipher, then All Hope Will Be Motherfucking Lost, but the character doesn’t yet realize that. Consider too a kind of “reversed stakes,” where what the character hopes to gain is something the audience knows would be bad fucking news — drugs, a gun, revenge, an angry coked-up screech owl.

23. Stakes Must Be Believable And Interesting

Do I need to explain that? I don’t really think so.

24. The Stakes Can Be On The Table Long Before The Story Begins

We don’t need the stakes to bloom with the story. They can have been in play for a very long time. This is the power of beginning a story as late as you can, in medias res — we jump in with the slow realization that this struggle has been in play for a while, and we’re about to witness how it all shakes out. We’re not watching a slow poker game from the start. We’re jumping in just as it’s getting real interesting — just as conflict mounts.

25. We Have To Know The Stakes

The audience has to know the stakes, and they have to know them sooner rather than later. The longer we go without being made to understand the stakes, the more lost we feel in terms of understanding the story and the characters’ motivations for interfacing with that story. Why do they struggle? Why take the journey? The stakes are key. Look at it this way: buried deep in every story’s program is an if/then statement. If X, then Y. If our hero defeats the demon, her soul is safe. If our antihero can’t recover the drugs, the crime lord will take his nuts as a prize. If this, then that. Cause, effect. Quest, treasure. Truth, consequence. What are the stakes? What’s on the table? What can be won, what may be lost?

* * *

Brooklyn, We Go Hard

This Wednesday, the 17th, at 7pm, I’ll be at WORD Bookstore in Brooklyn with T.L Costa (Playing Tyler) for “Angry Robot Night!”

We will sign books, take questions, maybe do a little reading. We’ll talk genre fiction and YA and whatever else you want us to talk about. It’ll be awesome.

YOU WILL COME, YES?

Yes.

I will see you there, then.

*stares at you until you decide to show up*

Details here!

Crowdsourcing The Essentials: Paranormal Romance

Last week: Urban Fantasy.

This week: Paranormal Romance.

Your job: go to the comments. Pop in and list your top three favorite (read: “essential”) paranormal romance novels. Go go go! Do it now! I’ll wait here behind this two-way mirror, taking weird sciencey-flavored notes. *scribble scribble*

(And I’ll tally the urban fantasy ones later in the week when I have time.)

(HA HA HA HA have time.)

(That’s a good one, me.)

(High-five)

Pacific Rim: Quick Brain Dump

I just saw Pacific Rim.

I will now commence neural bridge with you.

We have drift.

(warning: mild spoilers detected)

• This is the most fun I’ve had at the movies in a long, long time.

• It made me want to go play with toys. Big smash-em-up anime robots and giant monsters.

• The movie understands what it wants to be and never deviates from that. That said, it never precisely surpasses it, either. We are left with a model robots versus monsters film, though perhaps not exactly a transcendent one, either.

• This is not a big dumb action movie. It’s smarter and savvier than you think. Also: no gaping plotholes! It didn’t feel rushed or half-baked (unlike nearly all Hollywood tentpole releases these days). Del Toro knows his stuff here.

• The action is top-of-the-pops. Generally clear; not shaky. Heartpounding stuff. Some sequences could’ve used a better sense of danger and consequence but for the most part: aces.

• A lot of the action is also repeated in the movie trailers. Like, the scene with the “Boatsball Bat?” (i.e. whack kaiju in the face with a giant ship)? Yeah, that would’ve played so much more bad-ass if I hadn’t seen it in like, three of the 17 trailers for the movie. As it stood, most of the really cool action beats are robbed of their fist-pumping woo-hoo-ery by their repetition in all the commercials and trailers.

• Thankfully, the action isn’t necessarily what carries the movie. It’s awesome. It’s important. But trust me when I say you’re not just waiting impatiently for the next action sequence to commence — there’s some compelling character drama stuff and worldbuilding going on in the middle. Never drags.

• Okay, fine, Charlie Hunnam’s Raleigh character is a bit generic. I really wanted him to whoop it up — I mean, if you’re gonna write in the classic “unpredictable hero who wins the day unpredictably,” then you should really strive to write him as a loose, popping wire. Han Solo is a guy that could swing either way — and further, he appears to be having fun in the story (and the actor in the role). That’s not really true here.

• But it doesn’t matter because the real bad-ass is Rinko Kikuchi’s Mako Mori character. So awesome. Actually, there’s a flashback scene of her as a little girl in the midst of some bad shit going down, and that little girl actress needs to win a big bucket of Oscars, stat. Those scenes are the best in the movie. Emotionally affecting, exciting, scary, and at the end, triumphant. The kind of scene a Hollywood executive might dismiss as a drag on the film but that really, really anchors the character and the story.

• Idris Elba, of course, is rad as fuck.

• Although, Idris Elba is given one speech (again seen in trailers) that is so bland and so library paste it feels like you could’ve copy/pasted it from a hundred other cheesy action movies. “WE ARE MANKIND AND WE WILL BE VICTORIOUS” is a pretty boring thrust. Any writer worth his salt could’ve put some better rah-rah-rah blood-pumping speechifying in his mouth.

• The monsters are a little samey-samey by the end. Like, a few really stand-out, but part of the problem is, monsters have no actual persona. They’re intelligent, but they’re not characters. To anchor an otherworldly, unknowable enemy like that you need to find some kind of human evil. That’s why in zombie stories you tend to have some sinister human component to actually bring drama — otherwise, the enemy is basically the equivalent of a hurricane or a earthquake. A little of that in this film (opposing government? it’s set up in the beginning but never goes anywhere) would’ve gone a long way. Human evil is more interesting than alien agendas.

• Oh, and can I just say: Charlie Day and Ron Perlman, everybody. *round of applause that goes on long enough to be uncomfortable*

• This is the rare action movie where I could’ve used another half-hour added to it.

• The climactic showdown / end game is honestly a little too easy, too pat.

• Despite that, I was still thrilled by it, so. Yeah.

Anyway. There we go.

It’s epic fun.

You should see it.

And tell your friends to see it.

And then go see it again.

Because we need to support films that aren’t reboots or rehashes or sequels or prequels.

Flash Fiction Challenge: Last Lines First

Last week’s challenge: “The Last Line Of A Story“

Holy crap, people. Over three-hundred entries in last week’s challenge.

This is going to be a hard one.

Some of you are out of the running — if you enter multiple times, I mostly discount your entries because you put me into a kind of choice paralysis. Plus, you get lots of the dead bodies, bullets, revenge variety — some of this stuff starts to feel very samey-samey. (Oh, and more than a few of you have a very liberal interpretation of a “last line” of a story.)

That being said, still, so many good options.

So, this is the five I’ve picked:

m3nace: “If it wasn’t for the inflation the devil could have bribed them.”

Lani Gerbi: “And then, being mindful not to spill my tea, I eased into the tartan embrace of Endolyn Muirden’s least offensive armchair, and settled back to watch him die.”

Ben Dodge: “The old man lying in the hold died three minutes later.”

Marlanesque: “She closed the book and watched as it turned to dust.”

Ryan Viergutz: “Cristobal climbed the ladder of arteries to the first universe that looked like it held more wonders and mysteries than the last.”

Squishy: “That plan didn’t fly, superhero, and now we’re short a bazooka.”

Josh Roby: “Once upon a time, there was a story so short, it was only a single line.”

lverawrites: “Life was easier before killing all the rabbits.”

David: “They never did find the orangutan.”

Damien Kelly: “Truth be told, I’m not sure any of them are actually dead.”

You’ll note that I’ve chosen ten there.

If you’re one of the lines picked, email me at: terribleminds at gmail dot com.

You will receive some manner of digital goodies.

NOW, for this week’s challenge –

You think it’s going to be, “Pick one of these last lines and using it as a last line in your story.”

BZZT.

Nope.

I want you to pick one of these last lines and use it as the first opening line in your story.

You’ve got up to 1000 words.

Write your tale. Post at your online space. Link back here.

Due by next Friday. July 19th. Noon EST.

Pen-Ultimate Anthology

I don’t normally do press releases, but I like LJ Cohen and definitely like what this anthology supports, so, please read, consider checking it out.

LJ Cohen, Talib S. Hussain and Interrobang Books announce Anthology with proceeds donated to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Emergency Medical Fund

Newton, MA – Interrobang Books is pleased to announce the publication of “Pen Ultimate: A Speculative Fiction Anthology.” The anthology, edited by LJ Cohen and Talib S. Hussain, is comprised of eleven short stories written by up-and-coming writers in fantasy and science fiction and includes a foreword by Craig Shaw Gardner and an afterword by Jeffrey A. Carver.

All proceeds will be donated to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) Emergency Medical Fund. The fund offers interest-free loans to members facing unexpected medical expenses. Active SFWA members are eligible to request assistance from the fund. More information about the fund and how to directly donate to it can be found at

http://www.sfwa.org/about/benevolent-funds/emergency-medical-fund/.

The anthology will be unveiled at ReaderCon 24, an annual convention devoted to “imaginative literature” (www.readercon.com). The book is available in trade paperback edition through Amazon and CreateSpace, and e-Book editions through major online venues.

To purchase:

Amazon (print, ebook)

CreateSpace (print)

B&N

Smashwords

Ten Questions About Blood And Feathers: Rebellion, By Lou Morgan

Blood and Feathers is routinely shouted out as one of those modern urban fantasy classics — I’ve not yet heard a bad word said about the book. The follow-up is here already, and author Lou Morgan would like to tell you about it:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

Lou Morgan: epic procrastinator, medievalist, goody two-shoes. Also writer. Solaris published my first book, “Blood and Feathers” last summer, and they’ve just released the sequel, “Blood and Feathers: Rebellion”.

My short stories have turned up in anthologies alongside pieces by Joe Hill and Audrey Niffenegger, and I’m part of the team for this year’s World Fantasy Convention in the UK.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

The war between the angels and the Fallen has spread – and for Alice and angels Mallory & Vin, the stakes just got a hell of a lot higher.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

All over the place. Obviously, it’s a follow-up to “Blood and Feathers”, so it’s grown out of that book and the characters in it, but given that I’m British there’s also echoes of the London riots which I watched with a mixture of horror and a feeling of crushing inevitability, and the sense of global unrest that we’re all aware of.

Like the first book, it’s heavily influenced by medieval art and the portrayal of angels: more often than not, when you see them in paintings or carvings in cathedrals they’re in armour and I wondered how that would translate to our world, right now.

HOW IS THIS A STORY ONLY YOU COULD HAVE WRITTEN?

It’s about the things that interest me; the things I keep coming back to. Things like loss and grief and despair and revenge, and hope and faith and friendship and family: what it means to have someone come along who doesn’t pick you up when you fall down, but makes you realise that you can get up again all by yourself.

Besides that, it’s full of the kind of things that fall out of my slightly magpie-mind: riots, battles, sarcastic Archangels, churches and a funeral parlour run by Death. And maybe even redemption. But to get there, you have to go through hell.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING “BLOOD AND FEATHERS: REBELLION”?

I was pretty daunted by the idea of writing a sequel. It scared me. Would I be able to remember what the characters sounded like? Would I push them in directions they shouldn’t necessarily go? Would I even be able to finish it at all – or did I just get lucky with the whole “finishing a book” thing the first time around? And that was just the existential mess I got myself in before I’d even started.

Balancing the real and the unreal was also tricky. I use an incredibly famous location as the Archangel Michael’s stronghold: Mont Saint Michel, on the French coast. It’s one of the most photographed locations in the world, visited by millions every year and of real significance to a lot of people… and I mess with it. I’d realised I wanted to use it when I visited a couple of years ago – but I also knew that to get the best out of it for the story I wanted to tell, I was going to need to tinker with it slightly. I didn’t want to do too much, though, or what would be the point in using it in the first place? In the end, I had a discussion with my editor Jon about whether it should be The Real Place or I should use it as a jumping-off point and invent something totally new – and eventually settled on inserting a few deliberate mistakes in some of the descriptions. They don’t change anything exactly, but they’re also an acknowledgement that you’re looking at a fictionalised version of the Mont – one where the angels are in charge (because if my angels being in charge of it wasn’t fiction, frankly, I’d be getting nervous).

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING THE BOOK?

That the quickest way to find out whether or not something works is to do it! Worrying about whether X should happen in a story, or Y, or Z doesn’t solve anything: you just have to get on with it. I guess you can apply that slightly trite idea to life in general.

I also learned to have a lot more faith in myself as a writer. All that “second album syndrome” baggage doesn’t help – because it’s not about you. It’s about the story you’re trying to tell. That’s what matters, and it’ll find its way out when it’s good and ready. Your job is just to sit there, shut up and listen so you can pass it on.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT THE BOOK?

I loved being able to go back to the same characters and give them more history; giving them real pasts which have consequences and getting the chance to add more light and shade to them. But then I also loved bringing new characters in – ones like the Archangel Zadkiel, who was mentioned in the first book but never turned up in person, and who I’d been itching to write. I think more than anything, it’s just the general mayhem I love: the kind you get when there are angels with swords and guns and people can catch fire and all of them have something they’re fighting for… whether it’s good or bad.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

Next time, there’ll be a list of forbidden phrases stuck to the wall above where I write. There were two or three that I kept finding over and over again when we were editing, and good grief was I sick of deleting them by the end of the process. And I’ll make some kind of sensible index for my research: now having several notebooks full of completely, utterly randomised notes, I’m on the verge of losing my mind. And my research.

GIVE US YOUR FAVOURITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

(After an exhausting fight against the Fallen, Alice – tired and thoroughly pissed off – decides to school an Archangel in manners)

“Now you listen to me,” Zadkiel dropped his voice to a low hiss. “This is a war. The war. There is no stopping; no getting out. You’re in this – just like the rest of us – to the end. So, frankly, I don’t give a shit if you do it because you’re following orders, or because you want to make it through the day alive, or because you like the look of my fucking haircut. Just get it done.”

Alice stared at him and felt a flush creeping up her cheeks, but was determined to stand her ground. “You didn’t say please.”

“Excuse me?”

“You didn’t say please.”

“I didn’t say please?”

“No.”

“Fine. Alice: would you please take care of this?”

“Seeing as you asked nicely…” She shrugged; out of the corner of her eye, she spotted Castor giving her a thumbs-up and Vin trying to hide a smile behind his hand. Even Mallory seemed to have succumbed to a mysterious coughing fit.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

I have a couple of short stories which are knocking about and should see the light of day sometime this year, and at the moment I’m working on a YA book which is still in its very early stages. There’s a few other ideas I’d like to spend some time on which have been stewing for a while – now it’s just a case of waiting to see which one shouts the loudest for my attention.

Lou Morgan: Website / @LouMorgan

Blood And Feathers: Rebellion: Amazon US / Amazon UK / B&N / Waterstones / Hive 

Ten Questions About Drift, By Jon McGoran

Jon McGoran, man. I’m one of his cohorts in the Philly Liars’ Club and we both share the same agent — lemme tell you, this guy has talent and smarts in spades. Here he talks about his newest, Drift, which is (to me) the adult thriller cousin to my upcoming young adult book, Under the Empyrean Sky — hell, his book could be a prequel to mine. Food and pharmaceuticals crash together in a high-test paranoid thriller. You’re gonna wanna read it, but just in case — here’s Jon to talk about the book:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I write mysteries, crime, thrillers, the occasional science fiction story, and even a zombie story here and there. I have a series of forensic thrillers I wrote as D.H. Dublin, but Drift is my first novel as Jon McGoran. I also write about food and sustainability, formerly at Weavers Way Co-op, and now as the editor of Grid Magazine. Since I eat food as well as write about it, I’ve become a bit of an advocate, working to support urban agriculture and labeling of genetically modified foods. I live outside Philadelphia with my son Will and my lovely bride, Elizabeth, a  children’s librarian.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Cop drinking off a suspension out in the country discovers a plot involving drugs, GMOs & the blurring line between food and pharmaceuticals

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

For a long time, my food writing and my fiction were pretty separate, but as our food systems have gotten more and more out of whack, my nonfiction was getting crazier than the fiction. I figured our corrupt and dysfunctional food system was the perfect backdrop for a thriller, and when I had the idea for Drift, I realized it was time to bring the two parts of my writing life together, to write a thriller about the frightening things that were being done to the food we eat. Most of the obvious ideas for where a thriller would go had already happened in real life. (Corrupt and mysterious forces keeping the public in the dark while releasing untested new life forms into the environment? Been there, done that!) but the GMO issue has a lot of layers and angles. Some of the most powerful and promising GMO endeavors — like plants being engineered to produce pharmaceuticals — become very unsettling when you think about those plants escaping into the environment or cross pollinating with other plants. I was also intrigued by the way big corporations are trying to create situations where society is dependent on them in a very unhealthy way, like an addiction. Those are some of the ideas I explore in Drift.

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

Drift is unusual in a lot of ways, I hope. It’s written in first person, which makes it tricky to do some of the things thrillers are supposed to do, but lets you write with intimacy and immediacy, and a lot of voice. Hopefully, my voice is unique, so in that sense, I’m the only person who could have written this story. But, considering the urgency and importance of the topic, I am kind of surprised there aren’t more books out there about GMOs, and specifically more thrillers. (And obviously, a YA cornpunk trilogy about GMOs is going to be insanely successful, so I’ll definitely be looking for that!) The story of what has already happened with GMOs — the actual provable, demonstrable, acknowledged facts — already reads like a thriller. It’s a great and terrible back story that could go in a lot of directions.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING DRIFT?

There are so many compelling concepts involved in the GMO issue, it was hard leaving some of them out.  Things like the impact of GMOs on insects and animals, and the interaction between the big chemical companies and the government. Luckily, I am working on a sequel.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING DRIFT?

I already knew a lot about what was going on with GMOs, but in researching the topic, I learned a lot more, like how GMO manufacturers are using patent protection to thwart efforts to conduct meaningful research on the long-term health and environmental impact of GMOs.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT DRIFT?

I think the ideas behind the book are important, and I’m a bit of a plot guy, so I really like some of the twists, but, probably like most writers, I love my characters. Doyle especially, because that’s the point of view I am writing from, but really all of them — his new friend Moose and his romantic interest Nola, all the bad guys and minor characters, too. I love the relationship between Doyle and his partner, Danny, and with Stan Bowers, his friend at DEA. There are also characters who aren’t even in the book, who exist off stage, and I find them fascinating, too. WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

Since writing Drift I have learned a lot more about heirloom seeds, and I would have included more of that. There are farmers out there using seed-saving and growing techniques that have been around for thousands of years, and suddenly that is subversive or even illegal. Some of them are being aggressively litigated against by companies like Monsanto. I would have included more about that. But I’ll look forward to exploring that in a future book. I might also try to cut back on the coffee.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

As the phone fell away from my face, I thought: My mom is going to die while this fuck- head tries to get his days straight. I don’t remember thinking much after that. I got out of the van, a cardinal sin in the middle of surveillance, and I walked around the corner, straight up to where Danny and Rowan were standing.

Danny’s eyes widened, then his face fell back into the same heavy lidded suspicious gaze as Rowan’s. We’d been working pretty hard the past few days, so I looked rough enough to pass for someone making a buy. As Rowan looked over at me, ready to take my order, Danny flashed me one last glare to remind me how much time and energy he’d invested in his cover.

The first thing I did when I came up to them, I planted a left in Danny’s face. I didn’t pull it, either— I popped him and dropped him. If I was going to pull something, it had to look real.

Rowan yelped like I’d stepped on his tail. He tugged a gun from the back of his pants, but he couldn’t seem to get a grip on it, bobbling it like some half- assed juggler until I snatched it out of the air between his hands and pressed it against his temple.

“When’s the re- up?”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

I am hard at work finishing up Deadout, the sequel to Drift. It deals with possible links between GMOs and colony collapse disorder, the mysterious syndrome that is causing billions of bees to vanish without a trace.

Jon McGoran: Website / @JonMcGoran

Drift: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound