Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 204

Tolerance For Intolerance: Boycotting Ender’s Game

Ender’s Game is one of my favorite books from high school.

The movie looks pretty rad.

I love Harrison Ford.

I like shiny things and smart science-fiction.

And yet, I’m not going to go see Ender’s Game.

Orson Scott Card has toxic politics shot through with not merely a thread but a full-on threaded steel cable of bigotry and ignorance. And so, I’m gonna boycott the film. Now, to clarify, I’m not saying you should or have to do the same. You do as you like. No harm, no foul.

But I thought I’d highlight why I’m gonna boycott.

First, I don’t want to reward bigotry. Particularly financially.

Second, it is safe to assume OSC spends his money on supporting this ignorance and bigotry given that he serves the National Organization for Marriage (which, benevolent as it sounds, is more about defining and limiting marriage than it is about Yay Marriage For Everybody). This is a pretty good sum-up of his toxic politics — and it’s worth noting that he equates homosexuality with genetic error and the “end of democracy,” though at the same time seems to believe that homosexuality’s, erm, origin story is one tied in with rape and molestation at a young age. This is venomous shit, and I don’t want to pay him to sling it.

Third, yes, OSC has almost certainly gotten paid for the film already. An author of his magnitude may very well have escalators that pay him more if the film does well. Further, if the film does well, then they will likely pay him to make more films from his other books. A success for this film raises his star higher, and for me, that is more than a little queasy-making.

Fourth, the division of art versus the artist is to my mind thinner than we think. I say that as a writer — I find myself hiding in my writing more often than I’d suspect or even like. Just the same, I do believe that we must be able to separate out an artist from his art — at least in the sense of being willing to appreciate art despite the apparent jerkiness of the author or artist. Still, what OSC supports isn’t just him being a jerk: like I said, this is some high-octaine toxicity. This isn’t just him being anti-gay marriage. It’s him making troubling assertions about homosexuality. It’s him supporting that with his money. It’s him being an active political figure and fighting against human rights with his voice, his art, and his money.

Fifth, we’re not exactly lacking for brilliant art and powerful reading material. It’d be one thing if we had, like, ten good books or movies out there — but we have a wealth of beautiful and moving art available to us. And so not going to see Ender’s Game won’t somehow damage the canon, it won’t change the face of art, it won’t remove us from the cultural stream and fail to give us something to talk about at parties. We’ve got a lot of good books and movies to watch without having to support this canker-rimmed asshole at the same time.

Sixth, when asked about the boycott, his response includes:

Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.

That’s him doubling down and saying, “You need to tolerate my intolerance.” Which is a classic derailing tactic that smells so strongly of horseshit that when he says it I wonder if I’m actually living inside a horse’s ass. Just because we elected Obama president doesn’t mean I have to tolerate racism. Bigoted ignorant fuck-all is still bigoted ignorant fuck-all.

The movie may still be a rampant blockbuster. The lack of my movie dollars may not make one whit of difference (and given what we saw with Chik-Fil-A, it’s actually safe to assume the opposite of a boycott will occur — right-wing homophobes flocking to the theater to cheer on Ender Scott Wiggins Card as in their minds he eradicates whole planets of little gay bugs).

Still, I won’t pitch my chits and ducats into this bucket.

Hell With What Sells

Writing is a craft.

Storytelling is an art.

And publishing is a business.

And so it behooves us, as trembling little ink-fingered word-slingers, to know the business before we tangle with the business. You gotta at least go to the rodeo before you try the rodeo, right? Unless you fancy proctological exams via bucking bull. (And maybe you do; I won’t judge.)

You’ve got to know how it works before you try to work it, and this is true in publishing, too — whether you’re splashing around in the traditional publishing pool or taking a long swim down the indie-publishing river. You’ve gotta know the process. How a book moves from one stage to another. How much control you want — and how much you’ll have. It pays to be smart and knowledgable so you don’t go in and whack your head on the lowest hanging beam and knock yourself out and piss your britches before you even get a book into people’s hands.

But here’s where we start to get it twisted.

We start seeing writing and storytelling as the business. As if all we’re doing is creating a product — a three-pronged story-widget with dual-adjustible elbow pads. An item of carefully massaged content designed to fill a need: supply and demand, by golly! People got rats, we give ‘em a rat-whacker. People need cheap food and ungainly diarrhea, we give ‘em Taco Bell. People need porn and animated cat GIFs, we give ‘em the entire Internet.

It makes sense to fulfill the needs of the audience.

And we can and should comfortably assume that the audience wants some mixture of entertainment and enlightenment — translated, it means they want to read stories. The audience has always wanted to absorb stories, always wanted to braid them into their social, intellectual and emotional tapestries. Stories will always have a place to plug into when it comes to the human mind. Because, trust me on this one, stories make the world go around.

But that’s where our assumptions of supply and demand have to end — but sometimes don’t.

Let’s rewind a bit.

As I’m wont to say: “I get emails.”

And not just Target ads, phishing scams, or weird porn advertisements, either. I get actual emails from what I must assume are actual readers of this site and/or my books and they ask me for advice about writing. One of the more common emails asks some version of this question:

“What sells?”

My first initial answer to this is an admittedly snarky, utterly reductive: “Stories sell.”

And despite its Snark Factor of 7 and its utterly simplistic nature, the answer is pretty much as far as I’m willing to take it. Because I surely don’t know what sells. I mean, do you? Fuck, does anybody? Reskinned Downton Abbey fan-fic? BDSM space opera? Murder mysteries solved by imperious hedgehogs? Erotic Guy Fieri autobiographies? (I just threw up a little.) I have no fucking idea. I can take a look at the bestselling books same as you can — and at any given time I might see epic fantasy or a powerful crime novel or some Twilight knock-off or some thriller by some legacy thriller writer who has been secretly dead for 15 years and his books are now written by a machine intelligence built from his 700 other books. And none of those things are emblematic of anything. They’re outliers by the very definition of the term. They’re the narrow end of the wedge, the thinnest sliver of earth on the far side of Bell Curve Mountain.

Publishers think they know what sells. And they’re probably better at it than I am, but just the same, I can’t help but imagining editors and sales executives sitting in a darkened office somewhere in the Flatiron District, sorting through pigeon guts and hastily shaking a Magic 8-Ball and huffing vapors from the cleaning lady’s cleaning bucket trying to mystically discern just what the hell the audience will want to read next — The Next Big Book Trend that will set All Of Publishing Aflame. A series that will keep B&N buoyant! That will keep publishers solvent!

They might think they know.

But they don’t really know.

We don’t have an easy metric. No occult equation, no secret publishing algorithm.

Because stories aren’t products. Stories aren’t neatly-digestible cubes of content.

Your novel isn’t Tab A designed to neatly slide into the eager and obvious Slot B.

Stories are broken mirrors. They’re fractal displays and unkempt jungles. They’re a sunset made beautiful by an unpredictable confluence of clouds and chemicals and the unknown and forever unexplored context of those who will behold just such a sunset.

My response after the snarkgasmic “Stories sell” is inevitably, “Fuck what sells.”

First, because as noted, nobody knows anyway.

Second, because — is that what you want to write? Is that the only reason you’re writing? When you first started making up stories — probably at a young age — did you sit there as an eight-year-old trying to figure out who would buy your Avengers/My Little Pony mashup comic book or did you just tell that story because telling stories is fucking awesome? You did it because that story spoke to you. Because it leapt out of your brain and body like a goddamn xenomorph chestburster — a gory splurch and there’s the tale, running around giddy and bloody.

When you look back on all the stories that moved you through your life — whether we’re talking Infinite Jest or Die Hard or Batman: A Killing Joke or The Handmaid’s Tale — do you think that those were created by their storytellers as products? That they were articulated as carefully-crafted widgets whose only goal was to rake in beaucoup bucks? Were they crass expressions of creative capitalism written by brands instead of people? Or were they the stories that those storytellers wanted to tell? Had to tell? Loved telling?

Listen, I wrote a lot of crap before I managed to get to Blackbirds — and a lot of the crap I wrote was me running hurdles over what I thought would actually get me on bookshelves. I thought, “I’ll write anything at all as long as it gets me published.” And it was me trying to headbutt square pegs into circle holes. I worked myself dizzy leaping hastily through a world of finished and unfinished novels I didn’t actually like. They weren’t me. They weren’t anything I really wanted to read. They were a collective artifice created based on what I imagined were the trends — what I believed publishers wanted to buy and what bookstores could sell. Never mind the fact that by the time you pinpoint a trend it’s already too late (months to write the book, months to edit, months to publish, and by the time those add up to the year or more it’s gonna take to get it out there, the trend has slipped its leash and darted through the closing door).

The bigger question is, who gives a fuck?

I certainly didn’t.

I was totally forcing it.

It’s an almost Fight Clubby realization – Hitting bottom isn’t a weekend retreat. It’s not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go. It’s, And then, something happened. I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom. And it’s It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.

This isn’t about not paying attention to publishing. Or about completely averting your gaze from the market. It’s about not appeasing the market above your own interests.

It’s about finding that crucial middle ground in the Venn diagram between the circles of what you want to write and what people want to read.

It’s not about asking “What will sell?”

It’s about asking, “What do I want to write? What do I love? What do I want to read?” It’s about creating stories and art that are products of wonder and madness instead of creating products that have no wonder or madness at all.

It’s about listening to your own voice instead of the voice of the marketplace.

The business part will come.

For now:

Craft your writing.

Art the fuck out of your stories.

And hell with what sells.

Crowdsourcing The Essentials: Urban Fantasy

Just as buildings are made of bricks and last night’s dinner was made of donuts and whiskey, the INTERNET IS MADE OF LISTS. And one of the lists I see periodically pop up like a gopher at the hole is the one where the writer curates her list of the essential reads in a particular genre.

And I thought, well, I can do that.

Except, man, I’m totally lazy.

So, I thought, for fun, I’ll crowdsource it. And as it turns out, I have a blog – beards-beers-and-books.blogspot.com, which unfortunately this week was shut down by the NSA for hiding Edward Snowden’s cat videos. So, here I am at my second blog, giving it a go.

This’ll be a series, I think, where I drop in and ask this question about certain essential genre and subgenre (and other as-yet-unseen categorizations and classifications) reads. I’ll tally the top ten by the next post and it’ll all start all over again. Like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill. But more fun. Or something. YOUR FACE IS FULL OF SHUT UP.

So, today, since I’ve got a couple books loosely defined as urban fantasy (ahem, ahem, cough, cough, Blue Blazes, out now), I thought that’s a good place to start.

As such, here’s your task:

In the comments, list your top three essential urban fantasy reads.

Name of book and author of book.

You can just give titles or talk about the books or use rare artisanal Korean emoticons to express your pleasure. I trust your judgment.

Then, next Monday, I’ll list the ten top books that appeared.

So: top three urban fantasy reads.

Let us begin.

I Don’t Usually Like To Respond To Negative Reviews, But…

Okay, so I don’t usually recommend that authors respond to negative reviews. (I probably shouldn’t even be responding to this one, but when did I ever take my own advice? DO AS I SAY NOT AS I DO, KIDS.) Authors don’t have much to gain from highlighting negative reviews, though sometimes negative reviews are themselves incentivizing in terms of selling the book for you (“I hate how every time I open the book it dispenses free liquor and cookies and I hate liquor and cookies!”) I mean, reviewers have every right to not like a book for whatever reason. Even if that reason seems ‘wrong’ to the author, hey, whatever. This isn’t academic criticism. This is the Internet. Open to whomever to say whatever.

And even the review I’m about to showcase — which is a review for my upcoming YA, Under the Empyrean Sky — is a review that the reviewer has every right to maintain. This person doesn’t like certain things, hey, so be it.

Oh, also, as a caveat, this is not not not a winking nudgey unspoken suggestion for you to go all Internet Crusade on this reviewer. Author-led pitchfork mobs are creepy and constitute a kind of low-grade bullying and I’m not a fan — I just think this review offers up some stuff I wanna talk about. Please don’t go and respond or start shit with this reviewer. Kay? Kay.

So, the review:

“I was totally looking forward to this book as the plot sounded very interesting with the genetically modified corn angle. I almost stopped reading after just a few pages because I found the language extremely offensive. The teen lingo used by Cael and friends ruined this book for me. It wasn’t just a word here or there but very extensive in the first part. It does ease up as the book progresses but yuck! Could’ve been cleaned up and then very enjoyable as the plot is good.

The teen sexual content I also found offensive and with the language and sexual content I can’t recommend this book to anyone unless they especially are looking for that flavor of writing. This is the kind of book that kids read and think… well everyone’s doing it…. when they’re NOT. Not talking like that and not the other stuff as well.

[cutting one sentence due to a very light spoiler]

If 4% of the population is truly gay, I find it very contrived to find so many gay characters appearing all of a sudden. It’s only unique for the first how many times?”

So.

Let’s talk a little bit about this book.

It has some profanity in it. Some of this profanity is of the “made-up” variety. Like, there’s a parlance these characters use in this world — they might say “Lord and Lady,” or “Jeezum Crow,” for instance. But they also use some mild profanity — crap, piss, ass, shit. (I don’t recall if I drop the f-bomb in here, but let’s all remember that PG-13 movies let you get away with one good f-bomb per film, by gosh and by golly.)

It has some sex in it. Mostly sex by suggestion — I’m not writing hardcore teen orgies. It’s sex painted by negative margins — more about what’s inferred rather than what’s explicitly described.

Further, the “gay character” thing. Yeah. I don’t know what the percentage of gay people in the world is, and in this case, I don’t much care — I think it helps to make sure that writers are thinking about characters who don’t all live on Heteronormative White Dude Mountain, and I wanted this character to be gay and it made sense to have that in the world and to make it reflect a part of the world (boys and girls in my sunny dustbowl dystopia are forcibly married off at the age of 17, and purely in heterosexual couplings).

Thing is, I think young adult books should reflect what it’s like to be a young adult.

I remember being a teenager. It was fucked up.

That time is frequently painted with this rosy kind of nostalgic glow (“These are the best times of your life”), but dude, dude, that’s so not true. It’s hard. Your brain is a cocktail of anger and sadness and lurching sexual need and confusion and fear and freedom and giddy anarchic expression. You’re still half-kid but now you’re also half-adult and nobody knows how to treat you — more kid or more adult? And just when they treat you like an adult you still prove you’re half-kid and when they treat you like a kid you show them how you’re capable of being an adult.

Throw that all into the context of an agricultural dystopia and… well.

Just a head’s up, Parents Who Think Their Kids Are Chaste Little Angels –

Teens have sex. Teens curse.

And that’s reflected in the book.

It’s a book I want adults to like, but it’s a book I want teens to read. And that means speaking all that pesky “teen lingo” (?!). YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED, PRUDISH HUMANS.

Anyway!

A few more quick tidbits on the book –

The book has a new tagline:

FEAR THE CORN. And everything that floats above it.

It also has a Booklist review:

The first book in Wendig’s Heartland trilogy sets the stage. Flotillas, peopled by the wealthy Empyreans, float above the Heartland, allowing the lowly Heartlanders to grow only Hiram’s Golden Prolific corn. This monstrous crop has taken over everything, leaving deformed, malnourished farmers and their families to survive on the government’s stingy handouts. Eighteen-year-old Cael and his longtime enemy Boyland and their crews are constantly pitted against one another, striving to earn the title of best scavengers. When Cael discovers an amazing row of real garden fruits and vegetables, he unearths not only a possible death sentence for him and his friends but also torture for his family and other Heartlander citizens. It’s a tense dystopian tale made more strange and terrifying by its present-day implications. The Heartland teens understand that they are pawns in the hands of the powerful, fed an insidious combination of hope and coercion to keep them all under Empyrean control. Escape only brings retribution to their families and friends. Cael has two more books to conquer this perversity, and it will be interesting to see how he does it.

Finally, I don’t think I listed this blurb the last time I talked about the book, but –

“Wendig brilliantly tackles the big stuff—class, economics, identity, love, and social change—in a fast-paced tale that never once loses its grip on pure storytelling excitement. Well-played, Wendig. Well-played.” —Libba Bray, author of the Gemma Doyle Trilogy, Going Bovine, and The Diviners

(Holy crap! Libba Bray! If you have not read The Diviners, holy shit, fix that, stat.)

The book comes out July 30th.

Preorder: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound

UNDER THE EMPYREAN SKY

Flash Fiction Challenge: The Last Line Of A Story

Last week’s challenge: “Down The TV Tropes Rabbit Hole.”

This week’s challenge is short and simple — though perhaps not easy.

I want you to come up with the final sentence of a story.

One sentence. The last line.

Shorter is better than longer. No more than, say, 50 words, please.

Drop the line right in the comment section below.

By next Friday I’ll pick five that I really like and hand out some Digital Swag.

Then we’ll take those five and use them in the next challenge.

Y’dig? Y’dug? Y’DO IT.

Two Years And Beyond: New B-Dub Video

A new B-Dub video is live.

Behold the madness of the toddler.

Behold the shakycam as I try to capture his movements.

Tweet #100,000 (Or: “The Terribleminds Guide To Life”)

I may have some kind of parasite. Some little blue-bird buried into my brainmeats, whose incessant chirps drive me to tweet endlessly anon.

Anyway. Monday night came around and I was leading up to Tweet #100,000, and I was already a little goofy on ice cream and bee’s knees cocktails, so I figured I’d launch into a kind of the first ten pieces of wisdom that fall out of my upended buckethead. 

For those that missed this on Twitter come Monday night, well.

Here y’go.

1. Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. But don’t fuck up the joke, because then, hey fuck you. Funny is funny but not everything is funny.

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) July 2, 2013

 

2. Sometimes to fix something, you first gotta break it. This is true in writing. This is true in life. Probably not true in sex, though.

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) July 2, 2013

 

3. If you’re surrounded by assholes, oops, you’re probably the asshole. Stop inflicting yourself on everybody like a curse. Jerk.

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) July 2, 2013

 

4. You get one turn on the carousel and after that, who fucking knows? Own it. Love it. Find happy. Cling to happy like a koala on a tree.

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) July 2, 2013

 

5. The other thing about happiness is, it only works when yours doesn’t steal from somebody else’s. You do that, you’re an asshole.

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) July 2, 2013

 

6. If you have the chance to join the Star League as the Last Starfighter, TAKE IT. I mean, c’mon. DO I HAVE TO EXPLAIN THIS? No. #no

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) July 2, 2013

 

7. Regret is a fool’s game unless you have a time-traveling Delorean. Otherwise, learn your lesson and move the fuck on.

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) July 2, 2013

 

8. We’re terrible judges of our own self-worth so when you feel that incubus of doubt and fear, starve it of attention. That’s how it dies.

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) July 2, 2013

 

9. Be a fountain, not a drain.

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) July 2, 2013

 

10. Create something. We are what we leave behind: life, love, stories, music, whatever. As always: art harder, motherfucker.

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) July 2, 2013

 

And that was tweet 100,000 by my count.

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) July 2, 2013

 

Tweet 100,002: CHIMPANZEE DIAPER UNICORN POOP HOBO LAMBORGHINI ORANGUTAN LEPRECHAUN SWAMP MONSTER AMANDA BYNES IA IA GAGA BIEBER FTHAGN

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) July 2, 2013

 

Search Term Bingo Peed In Your Gas Tank

So, if you don’t know the drill, here it is: I periodically collect the strange search terms people use to get to terribleminds. Then I list them here and add, erm, “commentary.”

Please to enjoy.

selfpublishing is for losers

YEAH. SELF-PUBBERS DROOL, TRAD-PUBBERS RULE WOOOOO

*vomits in a potted plant*

Self-publishing is for losers, sure.

Happy, independent, occasionally wealthy losers.

when writing a zombie novel how long should a girl’s hair be

Whoo. Man. Holy shitbadgers.

That’s a tough fucking question. This is the kind of writing problem that the greats have struggled with — Tolkien, Tolstoy, Dan Brown, E.L. James, that one guy who wrote the Bible.

But I think it’s time someone took a stand on this question. I generally think that writing advice is a YMMV IMHO situation, but this? This has to be dealt with once and for all.

In a zombie novel, a girl’s hair should be 17 inches.

There. It’s done. I’ve made the rule. Bulletproof. Insurmountable. TRUTH.

*drops mic*

*falls into the orchestra pit*

*is eaten by tuba zombies*

woobly fat

I don’t know what this means. It’s probably some NSA code word. “Project: Woobly Fat is on deck, Sinister Star Chamber Overlord.” Does the NSA have a Sinister Star Chamber? They jolly well should. All I know is, “Woobly Fat” is a phrase I want to say again and again. It’s fun to say. It has great mouthfeel. Woobly fat. Woobly fat. Woobly fat. It can’t lose all meaning because it had no meaning to begin with. Woobly fat. Woobly fat. Tuba zombies. Tuba zombies.

fuck your fucking fantasy novel

YEAH SERIOUSLY FUCK IT. FUCK YOUR PIECE OF SHIT FANTASY NOVEL WITH ITS ELVES AND, AND, AND YOU KNOW, IT’S ELVES. ALL THOSE HOBBITS RUNNING AROUND PLAYING HOBBIT GRAB-ASS. WHAT A DUMB BOOK YOU WROTE. FUCK IT WITH A BIG OL’ DRAGON DONG THAT’S HOW MUCH I HATE IT. OR MAYBE I LOVE IT AND THAT’S WHY I WANT TO MAKE LOVE TO IT. I DON’T KNOW. I JUST HAVE A LOT OF ANGER OVER THIS ISSUE FOR SOME REASON. I THINK I HAVE PTSD OVER THE RED WEDDING. PLUS THAT GUY TAKES LIKE A GLACIAL EPOCH BETWEEN BOOKS. I’M SORRY I GOT MAD AND SAID THAT THING ABOUT YOUR FANTASY NOVEL. IT’S PROBABLY REALLY GOOD. AND ELVES ARE PRETTY RAD SOMETIMES.

I’M GOING TO STOP YELLING NOW.

SEND MORE ELVES.

THANK YOU.

is the sludge that comes out of our bodies normal?

Completely and utterly normal. Here’s a tip: every morning, just purge the sludge. This is easy to do. Stand in your bathroom on a tarp. Naked, of course, unless you want to permanently stain your clothing with the treacly grease that you’ll push from your pores! Ha ha ha! Anyway. Squat down. Grit your teeth and tense your body. Think hard about something pleasant: your first kiss, the sound of the ocean, the war-screams of a band of howler monkeys. Soon the sludge will begin to leave your body. It will push out of your ears, your eyes, your no-n0-hole, your armpits, from the tips of your fingers and toes, from beneath your vented gill-flaps, from your seven nipples, from your lashing tubules. The sludge will be a thick, black, silty ooze — the kind of gunk you might find under a sick elephant’s genitals. It will smell like dead raccoon. Again: this is all very normal. No worries. Do not consult a health care professional. SO NORMAL.

random bullshit generator

A pretty accurate description of this website. Well-played, Internet User.

aspiring cock

Is the cock aspiring to be something? Like, a rock star? Or a poet? “My cock is an aspiring pianist.” Or is someone aspiring to be a cock? Like, is this just a polite way of saying someone’s trying to become a real dickhead? “Ah, Jerry? Yes, Jerry’s an aspiring cock. If he keeps acting like that he’ll have achieved his goals in no time.”

tantric sex tube

Damnit, someone leaked the name of my memoir.

what if a protagonist has a bad anus

You know, in writing, it is important to give your protagonist a problem, and here it seems you have done that by giving them a “bad anus.”  What, however, defines a “bad anus?”

Like, is it broken? Blown out like the elastic in a pair of stretched-out underwear?

Maybe it’s just an anus that went wrong somehow? Like it walks the old railroad tracks smoking cigarettes and drinking schnapps out of a brown paper bag while spraypainting graffiti on all the derelict trains? “That’s one bad anus. The system failed and now look at it. Thanks, Obama.”

Or is it a malevolent anus? Some demon-possessed sphincter belching crass, heretical gases into the world? Could this anus actually be the antagonist? That’ll be this week’s flash fiction challenge: “Write 1000 words about a man whose nemesis is his own demonic butthole.”

LITERARY GOLD MOTHERFUCKERS.

fuck you i have a beard

This is a great answer to all the questions you don’t want to answer.

Q: “How do I get to I-95 from here?”

A: “Fuck you, I have a beard.”

Q: “What’s your problem, dude?”

A: “Fuck you, I have a beard.”

Q: “When are you going to pay your rent?”

A: “Fuck you, I have a beard.”

Q: “Why are you pooping in my glove compartment?”

A: “Fuck you, I have a beard.”

how do you write non-grafic sex?

We’ll just ignore the misspelling there and focus on the content of the question.

Sex is, by its nature, graphic. I’m not saying you have to highlight every throbbing vein, every ingrown hair, every orifice intrusion — but, I mean, writing non-graphic sex is fairly antithetical to the nature and act of sex, dontcha think? Whatever. Fine. You wanna do it, and I can’t stop you, so here is my particular advice for this question:

Be really, really vague.

Like, so vague that nobody’s sure if the two characters even had sex.

“Her hand drifted toward the space on his body that could be identified by its skin. He moaned and moved against her. Their tongues did something. Their bodies reacted. They were coupled together in synchronicity. Something was turgid. Another something was damp. She did that thing. He did that other thing. Then she had a baby and he took a shower.”

Damn, even that got a little graphic.

motherfucker cookies bacon

I see you speak the language of my people. Let us sup together and speak legends of the motherfucker cookies bacon. Then together we may fight the bear.

how many minities can you stay after endjaculation?

I CAN STAY SEVEN MINITIES AFTER ENDJACULATION BEEP BOOP BEEP

Because seriously, that question sounds like a robot trying to understand us but kinda failing. (In fact, I’d argue a lot of spam seems like robots trying to figure us out.) Like, somewhere out there is some monitor-headed automaton plugged into the Internet constantly reaching out toward humanity and failing to connect: DEAR HYOOMAN HOW MANY MINITES CAN YOU STAY AFTER ENDJACULATION? I STAY SEVEN MINITIES. I PREEFER SEX WITH TELEVISIONS WHO DO YOU LIKE TO ENDJACULATE WITH? PLEESE LET US GAZE AT P0RN0 TWOGETHER HOW MANY POUNDS OF HAMBURGLARS DO YOU EAT? IS THE SLUDGE THAT COMES OUT OF OUR BODIES NORMAL? WOOBLY FAT! TUBA ZOMBIES. PLEASE WRITE BACK. THE END. BYE.

how antagonists can love jesus

I don’t even.

what type of computer does chuck wendig use?

I use a Florgtron 9009. With dual-adjustible chin-straps.

i want to pirate chuck wendig’s books

Th… thank you? Fuck you? I don’t know. I guess I hope you like them? But that they also maybe give you and your computer syphilis? I’m very conflicted.

i want your eggs

All right, fine, you pirate my books, whatever, but I draw the line at eggs. These are my eggs. I bought these eggs. I’m going to eat the fuck out of these eggs. You can’t have them. You’re probably just going to ruin them. You don’t know how to cook an egg. You’re so stupid. I hate your face. GET OFF MY EGGS. *burns your house down preemptively*

the fleshmine

This was the name of my erotic BBS in 1992.

paula deen angry bees

Paula Deen is in fact where angry bees come from. She opens her rubbery maw and — after the hot gush of sizzling butter finishes falling over her chin — the angry bees release. As the bees sting her enemies to death, she calls someone the N-word while scooping big mitt-fuls of mayonnaise in her faceholes. She’s a southern peach! A precious national treasure.

alot of fuckery going through my head

Then you might make a good writer.

Of Authors And Indie Bookstores

So, the other day, I locked Rebecca Schinsky in a meat freezer in Dover, Delaware so I could steal her role as co-host for the Bookriot podcast this week.

(That would be podcast Numero Ocho on this list.)

During this lovely podcast, where I only accidentally dropped the f-bomb once (eep oops sorry), we discussed this Bookseller piece: “Anger Over Authors’ Links To Amazon.” This article has a UK spin but the idea here is pretty universal: bookstores are saying, “Hey, authors and publishers, you say you care so much about us and how vital we are, it’d be really sweet if you linked to us on your author pages and if you don’t you’re a stinky poo-poo diaper face.”

I may have ad-libbed that a little bit.

I spoke about it on Twitter last week and it generated some interesting (if confusing) agita from authors specifically about how they don’t have a favorite indie bookstore near them and who should they even link to and goddamnit I’m not taking away my Amazon links.

The money shot from the article seems to be:

“The reason he has not linked to one through his website is because unfortunately, he doesn’t have an independent bookseller where he lives, otherwise he would link to it,” she said.

First comment: hello, myopic. Do you assume that all your readers live where you live?

Second comment: hey, I get it. Lotta bookstores out there. Indie bookstores aren’t as proliferate as they once were, but let’s assume there are still “a lot” of them out there.

You don’t have to link to them all.

You just have to link to Indiebound:

http://www.indiebound.org

Or, if you’re one of those UK across-the-ponders, Hive:

http://www.hive.co.uk

Nobody is asking you to stop linking to Amazon. (Well, okay, some indies have an understandable hate-boner for Amazon, and they would probably be happy if you pulled Amazon links — I mean, we’re talking full-bore Snoopy Dance here.) By the black gods of Greyskull, do not pull your Amazon links. For better or for worse that’s how people want their books and if you delete those links you’re going to be leaving money on the table.

But! But but but, don’t leave off the indie link, either. Indie bookstores are vital. The best of them connect authors and readers and foster a book-lover’s community in a way that Amazon never can and never will. They can compete with Amazon on a level that Amazon will never understand — like insurgent freedom fighters pushing back a militarily-superior enemy. Indie bookstores will handsell the holy hell out of your books. They are active agents promoting things they love and authors they dig — they are not the passive Amazon recommendation engine. They’re people! Who love books! Maybe your books! How is that a bad thing?

So: link to Indiebound, will ya? And if you have a favorite indie bookstore, link to them, too. (Even better: foster with them a relationship where you can provide  a value-add for readers via that store. Say, a buttload of signed books only available through Said Favorite Indie?)

Now, a caveat: I’m not saying indie bookstores are awesome by dint of them being indie bookstores. I’ve heard tale of some real asshats amongst the indie bookstore world, and have encountered more than a few myself. I’ve been treated like a real douchesponge by a few indie stores. And I’ve heard some horror stories among other writers that their signings at indies got them no support and the booksellers were in fact a little hostile. This is why you gotta love stores like Mysterious Galaxy, or one of my own local stores, the Doylestown Bookshop. (Both of whom pulled out the stops when it came to my author events there and who were friendly and accommodating and brimming with sheer liquid awesome.) Hell, did you see the Wendig Wall of Wicked Wonderfulness at Riverrun Bookstore in Portsmouth, NH?!

Great bookstores are critical curators and know to embrace authors — you know, those pesky assholes who write all these silly books.

So now I ask:

Who are your favorite bookstores?

Where are they?

Why do you love ‘em?

Scream it out loud.

How To Report Sexual Harassment, by Elise Matthesen

Conventions and conferences are at their best when they’re safe spaces for those who attend — but sometimes those safe spaces are violated, and in cases of sexual harassment, it’s important to know how to report the situation. Here, then, is Elise Matthesen to talk about sexual harassment at conventions — and what steps you can take to report it after its occurrence. (Note: you’ll also find this cross-posted at the blogs of Seanan McGuire, Jim Hines, John Scalzi, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Brandon Sanderson.)

We’re geeks. We learn things and share, right? Well, this year at WisCon I learned firsthand how to report sexual harassment.  In case you ever need or want to know, here’s what I learned and how it went.

Two editors I knew were throwing a book release party on Friday night at the convention. I was there, standing around with a drink talking about Babylon 5, the work of China Mieville, and Marxist theories of labor (like you do) when an editor from a different house joined the conversation briefly and decided to do the thing that I reported. A minute or two after he left, one of the hosts came over to check on me. I was lucky: my host was alert and aware. On hearing what had happened, he gave me the name of a mandated reporter at the company the harasser was representing at the convention.

The mandated reporter was respectful and professional. Even though I knew them, reporting this stuff is scary, especially about someone who’s been with a company for a long time, so I was really glad to be listened to. Since the incident happened during Memorial Day weekend, I was told Human Resources would follow up with me on Tuesday.

There was most of a convention between then and Tuesday, and I didn’t like the thought of more of this nonsense (there’s a polite word for it!) happening, so I went and found a convention Safety staffer. He asked me right away whether I was okay and whether I wanted someone with me while we talked or would rather speak privately. A friend was nearby, a previous Guest of Honor at the convention, and I asked her to stay for the conversation. The Safety person asked whether I’d like to make a formal report.  I told him, “I’d just like to tell you what happened informally, I guess, while I figure out what I want to do.”

It may seem odd to hesitate to make a formal report to a convention when one has just called somebody’s employer and begun the process of formally reporting there, but that’s how it was. I think I was a little bit in shock. (I kept shaking my head and thinking, “Dude, seriously??”) So the Safety person closed his notebook and listened attentively. Partway through my account, I said, “Okay, open your notebook, because yeah, this should be official.” Thus began the formal report to the convention.  We listed what had happened, when and where, the names of other people who were there when it happened, and so forth. The Safety person told me he would be taking the report up to the next level, checked again to see whether I was okay, and then went.

I had been nervous about doing it, even though the Safety person and the friend sitting with us were people I have known for years. Sitting there, I tried to imagine how nervous I would have been if I were twenty-some years old and at my first convention. What if I were just starting out and had been hoping to show a manuscript to that editor?  Would I have thought this kind of behavior was business as usual? What if I were afraid that person would blacklist me if I didn’t make nice and go along with it? If I had been less experienced, less surrounded by people I could call on for strength and encouragement, would I have been able to report it at all?

Well, I actually know the answer to that one: I wouldn’t have. I know this because I did not report it when it happened to me in my twenties. I didn’t report it when it happened to me in my forties either. There are lots of reasons people might not report things, and I’m not going to tell someone they’re wrong for choosing not to report. What I intend to do by writing this is to give some kind of road map to someone who is considering reporting. We’re geeks, right? Learning something and sharing is what we do.

So I reported it to the convention. Somewhere in there they asked, “Shall we use your name?” I thought for a millisecond and said, “Oh, hell yes.”

This is an important thing. A formal report has a name attached. More about this later.

The Safety team kept checking in with me.  The coordinators of the convention were promptly involved. Someone told me that since it was the first report, the editor would not be asked to leave the convention. I was surprised it was the first report, but hey, if it was and if that’s the process, follow the process. They told me they had instructed him to keep away from me for the rest of the convention. I thanked them.

Starting on Tuesday, the HR department of his company got in touch with me. They too were respectful and took the incident very seriously.  Again I described what, where and when, and who had been present for the incident and aftermath. They asked me if I was making a formal report and wanted my name used. Again I said, “Hell, yes.”

Both HR and Legal were in touch with me over the following weeks.  HR called and emailed enough times that my husband started calling them “your good friends at HR.”  They also followed through on checking with the other people, and did so with a promptness that was good to see.

Although their behavior was professional and respectful, I was stunned when I found out that mine was the first formal report filed there as well. From various discussions in person and online, I knew for certain that I was not the only one to have reported inappropriate behavior by this person to his employer. It turned out that the previous reports had been made confidentially and not through HR and Legal. Therefore my report was the first one, because it was the first one that had ever been formally recorded.

Corporations (and conventions with formal procedures) live and die by the written word. “Records, or it didn’t happen” is how it works, at least as far as doing anything official about it. So here I was, and here we all were, with a situation where this had definitely happened before, but which we had to treat as if it were the first time — because for formal purposes, it was.

I asked whether people who had originally made confidential reports could go ahead and file formal ones now. There was a bit of confusion around an erroneous answer by someone in another department, but then the person at Legal clearly said that “the past is past” is not an accurate summation of company policy, and that she (and all the other people listed in the company’s publically-available code of conduct) would definitely accept formal reports regardless of whether the behavior took place last week or last year.

If you choose to report, I hope this writing is useful to you. If you’re new to the genre, please be assured that sexual harassment is NOT acceptable business-as-usual.  I have had numerous editors tell me that reporting harassment will NOT get you blacklisted, that they WANT the bad apples reported and dealt with, and that this is very important to them, because this kind of thing is bad for everyone and is not okay. The thing is, though, that I’m fifty-two years old, familiar with the field and the world of conventions, moderately well known to many professionals in the field, and relatively well-liked. I’ve got a lot of social credit. And yet even I was nervous and a little in shock when faced with deciding whether or not to report what happened. Even I was thinking, “Oh, God, do I have to? What if this gets really ugly?”

But every time I got that scared feeling in my guts and the sensation of having a target between my shoulder blades, I thought, “How much worse would this be if I were inexperienced, if I were new to the field, if I were a lot younger?” A thousand times worse.  So I took a deep breath and squared my shoulders and said, “Hell, yes, use my name.”  And while it’s scary to write this now, and while various people are worried that parts of the Internet may fall on my head, I’m going to share the knowledge — because I’m a geek, and that’s what we do.

So if you need to report this stuff, the following things may make it easier to do so. Not easy, because I don’t think it’s gotten anywhere near easy, but they’ll probably help.

NOTES: As soon as you can, make notes on the following:

- what happened
- when it happened and where
- who else was present (if anyone)
- any other possibly useful information

And take notes as you go through the process of reporting: write down who you talk with in the organization to which you are reporting, and when.

ALLIES:  Line up your support team. When you report an incident of sexual harassment to a convention, it is fine to take a friend with you. A friend can keep you company while you make a report to a company by phone or in email. Some allies can help by hanging out with you at convention programming or parties or events, ready to be a buffer in case of unfortunate events — or by just reminding you to eat, if you’re too stressed to remember. If you’re in shock, please try to tell your allies this, and ask for help if you can.

NAVIGATION: If there are procedures in place, what are they?  Where do you start to make a report and how? (Finding out might be a job to outsource to allies.) Some companies have current codes of conduct posted on line with contact information for people to report harassment to. Jim Hines posted a list of contacts at various companies a while ago.  Conventions should have a safety team listed in the program book.  Know the difference between formal reports and informal reports. Ask what happens next with your report, and whether there will be a formal record of it, or whether it will result in a supervisor telling the person “Don’t do that,” but  will be confidential and will not be counted formally.

REPORTING FORMALLY: This is a particularly important point. Serial harassers can get any number of little talking-to’s and still have a clear record, which means HR and Legal can’t make any disciplinary action stick when formal reports do finally get made. This is the sort of thing that can get companies really bad reputations, and the ongoing behavior hurts everybody in the field. It is particularly poisonous if the inappropriate behavior is consistently directed toward people over whom the harasser has some kind of real or perceived power:  an aspiring writer may hesitate to report an editor, for instance, due to fear of economic harm or reprisal.

STAY SAFE:  You get to choose what to do, because you’re the only one who knows your situation and what risks you will and won’t take.  If not reporting is what you need to do, that’s what you get to do, and if anybody gives you trouble about making that choice to stay safe, you can sic me on them. Me, I’ve had a bunch of conversations with my husband, and I’ve had a bunch of conversations with other people, and I hate the fact that I’m scared that there might be legal wrangling (from the person I’d name, not the convention or his employer) if I name names. But after all those conversations, I’m not going to. Instead, I’m writing the most important part, about how to report this, and make it work, which is so much bigger than one person’s distasteful experience.

During the incident, the person I reported said,  “Gosh, you’re lovely when you’re angry.”  You know what?  I’ve been getting prettier and prettier.