Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 208

Flash Fiction Challenge: Choose Your Random Words

All right! This week’s challenge is late — I’d written one to post on Friday but WordPress… ate it? I don’t know. It was there one day, then the next it wasn’t. And by then I was at BEA partying with Grumpy Cat, so, it was too late.

Just the same, I’ve had a few folks email me and ask me to still do one.

SO HERE WE ARE.

Your challenge this week:

Pick three words from the list of ten.

Incorporate these words into your story.

Ready?

Scarecrow
Mint
Epidemic
Tongue
Republic
Scorpion
Divorce
Moon
Holiday
Legend

Again: three words. Incorporate into the tale. Which doesn’t mean simply using those words — it means making them parts of the plot, characters, or motifs found within. You can choose these words randomly (d10 or random number generator) or eschew chaos and hand-pick ‘em.

You’ve got (less than) one week.

Due by Friday, June 7th, noon EST.

Write ~1000 words at your online space. Link back here.

CHOOSE YOUR WORDS AND WRITE.

Ten Questions About The Year Of The Storm, By John Mantooth

Sometimes you get a book that has some buzz with it, a book you really want to tear into soon as you get a chance — for me, this is one of them, because it sounds right in my narrative sweet spot. Here’s author John Mantooth talking about his newest, The Year Of The Storm:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I’m a southern boy, born in Georgia, raised in Alabama.  I’m a dad, a husband, a teacher, and a writer.  In past lives I coached basketball, drove a school bus, played bass in a rock and roll band, and loafed with such effortless grace some observers called it sublime (others called it something else).

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Nine months after Danny’s mother and sister disappear in the woods behind his house, a tortured Vietnam vet shows up at his door claiming to know their whereabouts.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

I think it comes from wanting to write a story that actually explains where missing people go.  I mean, I think I know where they go.  Logic tells us that a missing person has moved on with their life somewhere else, been abducted, or they’ve been murdered.  Illogically, I’ve always wanted there to be another option.  I wanted there to be a “slip” that people sometimes could stumble upon, and when they did, it would take them somewhere else, some “other” world.  So, I suppose that’s why I wrote the story.  That, and I had an old painting that one of my grandmother’s sisters had done years ago that captured my imagination.  It was of a little cabin at dusk, sitting on the outskirts of what appeared to be a swamp.  That painting influenced the book probably more than anything else.

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

Oh that’s a tough one.  I suppose I’d say it’s southern, it’s gritty, and it has a speculative element.  It also has a sort of hopefulness in the face of the hard (and inevitable) knowledge that the world can be a cruel and unforgiving place.  I don’t necessarily set out to get that in my stories, and I hesitate to call it a theme, but it’s difficult to read any of my work without getting at least a whiff of it.  I like to think of it as a sort of tough grace.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING THE YEAR OF THE STORM?

The ending.  I must have rewritten it a dozen times, and when I say the ending, I mean the last fourth of the book.  Endings are extremely difficult for me.  It was important that the ending didn’t just resolve the action of the story, but also resolved or at least attempted to resolve the over arching emotional concerns of the novel.  This was especially challenging because this novel called for a touch of ambiguity to tie it all together.  But yeah, the ending kicked my ass.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING THE YEAR OF THE STORM?

I learned that I can get it right.  I think in the past when a novel got hard, I just quit and moved on to something else.  I learned that this is a terrible mistake because whatever you move on to is going to be just as hard in time.  You have to work through the difficulties.  Take a small break if necessary, but don’t abandon it.  Others probably have different opinions on this, but for me, I’ve got to push through and make it the story I envisioned.  Starting another story isn’t a solution.  It’s a delaying tactic.  Every story is hard in its own way.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT THE YEAR OF THE STORM?

I love the narrative voice.  It’s told by an adult looking back on his childhood.  I think it’s a voice I do particularly well.  It seems natural to me, easy to write.  I also love the setting.  It’s no particular place except rural Alabama, but when I reread sections, I feel like I got it right, if not in specifics, at least in tone.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

Write it faster.  The book took me three years.  Part of that was a result of teaching full time, having small kids, and getting my master’s in library science.  My kids are older now.  The master’s is done.  The next one is going to be faster.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

This takes place near the opening of the novel.  Danny, the narrator, wonders if the strange man in his front yard might somehow be related to the legends he’d grown up hearing.

“I’d been hearing the stories about these woods since I was a kid. Most of them were the generic campfire variety, the same urban legends reshuffled and personalized for different times, different settings, but one story was more than that. One story had the ring of authenticity. It was unique to these woods, and unlike the tales of hook hands and insane asylum escapees, it never seemed to fade away. Two girls, Tina and Rachel, lost in the woods behind our house. I grew up knowing their names just like I knew anything else. They were a part of the landscape, a part of the place where I lived. It didn’t matter if I’d never seen them or heard them speak or even gotten the whole story straight about their disappearances. I felt their presences intimately, and their loss settled on the woods like a heavy fog. When I walked through the darkest parts behind my house near dusk, sometimes I thought I saw them in the gloom, floating, transparent, made from spiders’ webs and dying streaks of light mingled with shadow. Their sad visages slithering round tree trunks and drifting past blooming moonvines. I shuddered, thinking that the man responsible for these disappearances might be standing in my front yard.”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

Working on the next novel.  I’m not going to say what it’s about because I’m superstitious like that and don’t want to jinx it.

Thanks for the interview, Chuck!

John Mantooth: Website / @busfulloflosers

The Year Of The Storm: Amazon / B&N

 

A True-To-Life Tale Of Bonafide Darling-Killing

Comes a time in every writer’s life that he’s gotta look at the work in front of him and he’s got to say, “This thing is thick with peacocks. Pretty, pretty peacocks.”

Then he’s gottta take a meat cleaver and start cutting up those pretty, pretty peacocks*.

Because those peacocks, pretty as they are, stand out. They’ve got them ostentatious tails. Those little tickly tiaras of alien antenna-feathers. They’re a color blue you don’t see anywhere except blue raspberry popsicles. They preen. They preen all the goddamn time. And they strut around like they own the place. They warble like motherfuckers. And, if we’re being honest, they shit up everything. They’re just shitting machines, those peacocks.

Of course, all this is me being metaphorical.

What I’m saying is, you write a story, you’re eventually going to come across some darlings.

Darlings are those elements of your story that fulfill two qualifications: first, you love them dearly, and second, your love isn’t enough to justify their existence. Some people misconstrue the darling. They say, “If you love it, kill it,” which is fucked up advice from any angle (“I LOVE YOU, HONEY, BUT SOME WRITER ONLINE SAID I HAVE TO MURDER YOU NOW”). Don’t destroy the parts of your work you love just because you love them.

No, we must destroy those things that we love that also unfortunately don’t belong.

Like, say, an ugly hat everyone tells you will get you beat up.

And you’re like, “But it’s fantastic. It has a propeller. And it houses squirrels.”

And everyone’s like, “But squirrels are pests.”

But you don’t listen and you walk outside the house and then a bunch of squirrel-hating squirrelophobes come out of the shrubs and beat you half to death with mailbox posts. And then your friends are like “We told you so. We told you about that hat.”

Point is, your love is not enough to save these darlings.

They are too precious to live.

Now, I like to dispense great heaps and mounds of dubious writing advice here in the vaunted halls of Terribleminds University, and the majority of that advice comes from my own (mis)adventures with the written word, and this one is no different. And so I present to you:

A TRUE TALE OF DARLING-KILLING

So, as you may have heard (since I was pretty noisy about it, sorry):

THE BLUE BLAZES is now out.

This book took a lot of work to bring out of my head. I swung for the fences on this one. It was at the time the longest thing I’d ever written, topping out at 100,000 words. It’s got an immeasurable fuck-sack of world-building in there — I tried not to borrow too much from previous sources and instead conjured my own version of what Hell would look like under the streets and tunnels of New York City (and, in some ways, above it, too). Between the gangs, the crime families, the Sandhog union, the goblins, the snakefaces, the daemon families –

Well, there’s a lot of stuff I threw at the wall.

And by golly, I loved it all.

I mean, sometimes I hated it, as is a writer’s wont. You careen drunkenly between obsessive love and infernal hate for your work on a daily — shit, even hourly — basis. But for the most part what I was throwing out was stuff I liked and was ready to defend by its end.

Case in point, the first:

The open and close of the book.

The first and last chapters of the book you (er, hopefully) have in your hands is not the first and last chapters as I wrote them initially. When I wrote them I wanted to introduce Mookie as a kind of monster figure, a human minotaur at the heart of his own labyrinth, right? An unexpected protagonist. So, I had this drunk guy (an outsider, really) who’d been kicked out of his house by his wife stumble into Mookie’s not-actually-open bar looking for a drink. And Mookie basically scares the shit out of him and kicks his ass a little and is about to throw him out — but there’s this moment where the two sad-sacks recognize each other’s sad-sackedness and while they don’t exactly commiserate, Mookie and he share a drink.

Then he kicks him out and the scene with Mookie’s daughter ensues.

Cut to the end where Mookie comes back to the bar and he’s alone — but he turns on the OPEN sign and who wanders in at midnight but that same guy, and we see how he ended up, and then there’s the hint of some commiseration. Two sad bastards. Drinking.

I liked it. It did things I dug. It bookended the piece.

And it didn’t work.

It took up too much time. It delayed the story. It was perpendicular to the point of the tale — while it leaned on some of the themes, thematic embrace is by no means enough for me. It has to do more to survive. Every inch of the work has to be willing to work double-duty lest it get:

A HOWITZER TO THE FACE.

It was easy enough to get rid of. He was a peripheral character. He had two chapters.

His death was clean and elegant. Extracting the body: effortless.

And then came Cassie Morgan.

Cassie was a full-fledged supporting character — a top-tier one, at that. She was daughter to Sandhog Davey Morgan, this young girl trying to prove herself among the Sandhogs but in doing so accidentally falls in with Mookie and his grim mission.  I had her in there as a surrogate daughter to Mookie — a foil to Nora, the real daughter, the daughter trying to hurt him.

She ended up in like, the whole goddamn book. She was everywhere. Instrumental in parts. Wound through the plot, braided in with other characters. And yet…

She had very little agency. She felt swept along.

Her journey felt incomplete.

And I was like, “Okay, that’s fine, I’ll just… fix it.” And as I tried to fix it — untangling the snarled threads, really — I just ended up knotting things up worse. Until at the end I was like a cat who had strangled itself half-to-death with its own ball of yarn. It was ugly business.

I realized that as a character, she felt redundant. I already had a daughter figure: Mookie’s actual daughter, Nora. Nora needed more page-time. Nora needed a complete arc that didn’t duplicate beats found in Cassie’s tale. Cassie felt peripheral. A hanger-on; a poser in the tale.

BUT I LIKED CASSIE. She was fun! Plucky! Tough! And… and…

And finally I said to my agent, “I think I need to let Cassie go.”

And she had the class not to say, “I knew this all along but you needed to figure this out on your own because otherwise you just would’ve made frowny-faces.”

She instead agreed politely.

And thus began the unsnarling, the untangling. I had to cut free the knots that formed from the enmeshing of Cassie into the plot. This is harder than you think. It’s not so simple as just summoning her name through the Find Text spell and quietly excising her from the tapestry — she had cause and effect. She was wedded to events, objects, timelines. Every snip saw another piece threaten to unravel — and I had to retie all the threads that connected to her originally.

It was messy.

I hated it.

I did it anyway.

And the book felt tighter. More meaningful. It put more emphasis on Nora. It gave the story more room, more pep, didn’t feel like it was tripping on its own characters.

It was an essential darling to murder.

A critical peacock to behead and put on display for all the other pretty, pretty peacocks.

So, my advice to you is the same that I have to take — this is the medicine, folks:

Kill your darlings. Two to the chest. One to the head. Shed your tears but never look back.

* —> P.S. we used to have a peacock growing up and it was murdered by a raccoon which is very sad so I don’t actually condone ACTUAL PEACOCK MURDER.

The Blue Blazes Photo Contest: Win A Big Damn Stack Of Books

HOLY CRAP IT’S OUT SOUND THE ALARM BURN ALL THE PANTS DRINK ALL THE LIQUOR DO CLUMSY PIROUETTES IN A PRETTY MEADOW AHHHHHH

Ahem.

As noted elsewhere today, The Blue Blazes is now out in the world.

It’s on shelves. Lurking there. Waiting for your eager touch.

And I’m lurking here, waiting to capture that eager touch on film.

More to the point, it’s time for a contest, baby!

Here’s how this works (the short version):

I want you to take a photograph of you with your copy of The Blue Blazes.

I will send a big tower of books to the person with my favorite photo.

Here’s how this works (the long version):

Go get The Blue Blazes. Physical copy probably makes a prettier photo, but you can do a digital copy on the e-reader of your choice (long as I can tell what book it is). Get your picture taken with the book. Send me that picture to terribleminds at gmail dot com.

You can obviously just do a picture of you standing there with the book, looking morose, and hey, maybe you won’t have much competition and you’ll sail into the sunset as the winner by default. But note that with this photo you are trying to appease my bizarre sensibilities. I am drunk and untrustworthy and you are trying to amuse and/or impress me in some capacity. I AM THE EMPEROR IN THE ARENA AND I WILL GIVE YOU A THUMBS UP OR A THUMBS DOWN. Thumbs up gets the prize. Thumbs down gets eaten by a flock of deranged cassowaries.

So: a funny picture! A dramatic picture! Sexy! Disturbing! Something! Anything! Surprise me!

The winner — who must, I am afraid, live in the United States because shipping on this collection is going to be an unruly bear — will get a package of books by yours truly that includes:

Blackbirds (UK trade paperback)

Mockingbird (UK trade paperback)

Under the Empyrean Sky: Heartland #1 (ARC paperback)

Unclean Spirits: Gods & Monsters #1 (trade paperback)

Double Dead (trade paperback)

Dinocalypse Now: Book #1 (trade paperback)

Beyond Dinocalypse: Book #2 (hardcover)

Bait Dog (hardcover Kickstarter edition)

Don’t Read This Book (paperback; anthology I edited)

Fireside Issue #1 (features my Atlanta Burns short, “Emerald Lakes”)

Human Tales (features my short, “The Toll”)

I will, of course, devalue all of these with my signature if you so desire.

That right there is 11 books.

And one of those books is the not-yet-released Under the Empyrean Sky, my cornpunk YA which John Hornor Jacobs calls a mash-up of Star Wars and Grapes of Wrath.

So: go take a picture of you with The Blue Blazes.

Send me the photographic evidence (either send me the file or a link to it).

Send it to terribleminds at gmail dot com.

I will share my favorites on this very blog.

I will choose one among my favorites to get the big-ass book stack above.

You have one week to get me that photo!

Ends next Tuesday, June 4th, at noon EST.

EDIT: I’m willing to consider international participants, but you gotta pony up the shipping (sorry!).

The Blue Blazes: Out Now!

The Blue Blazes is now available!

Let’s just dispense with your procurement options:

Amazon

Amazon UK

B&N

Indiebound

The Story

Mookie Pearl is a Blazehead — a user of the mystical drug known as Cerulean, a drug whose high tears away the veil of normalcy and reveals all the horrors and pleasures of the Underworld and its ilk. And Mookie knows a thing or two about the Underworld: he’s a knee-breaking thug who works for the Organization, a criminal coalition of gangs and crime families who control all of New York City’s illicit activities. Mookie protects the criminal underworld’s Cerulean trade from the threats of the mythic and monstrous Underworld beneath their feet — from gobbos, snakefaces, trogbodies, rogue molemen, and human cultists driven mad by the labyrinth.

Mookie’s already rough life gets a whole lot rougher when his own teenage daughter Nora (AKA “Persephone”) takes a run at him and his business, trying to peel away part of the Blue trade for herself — in the process, helping to reveal a far more sinister plot that pits the denizens of the Great Below against the citizens of New York City.

Featuring: Family drama, action, fantasy, profanity, tender emotion, burgeoning love, Sandhog monster-hunters (Local 147 represent!), roller derby girl gangs, the dead folk of the subterranean town of Daisypusher, ancient god-worms (or are they worm-gods?), charcuterie, demon families, gobbos, trogbodies, snakefaces, half-and-halfs, milk spiders, cankerpedes, roach-rats, gelled wastes, mystical pigment drugs (Cerulean! Viridian! Vermilion! Ochre! Caput Mortuum!), and a zombie stunt driver on a Hell-bound four-wheeler.

Some Strange Combination Of: Hellboy, Sin City, Goodfellas, Dante, Lovecraft, Neverwhere

OH AND HEY LOOK A CONTEST

Read The First 50 Pages

 

 

(If the above plug-in doesn’t work, try this link.)

What Others Have Said

“The Blue Blazes is exactly my kind of supernatural mob crime novel: dark and visceral, with an everyman hero to root for and Lovecraftian god-horror to keep you awake at night… this is the good stuff, right here.” — Adam Christopher, author of Empire State and The Age Atomic

“There’s something gloriously unhinged about the crazy mix of fantasy, horror and crime-fic that is The Blue Blazes. It’s dark and darkly funny, full of outrageously gory scenes and larger-than-life characters.” — Tor.com

“This is gritty urban fantasy as it should be done. Wendig has once again pulled that inimitable magic out of the bag and created something splendidly unique. The action is so thick at times that you might need to check you’re still breathing, and the twists keep on coming. So much fun that, like the five occulted pigments, it should be illegal.” — This Is Horror

“Another thing is that Wendig makes Nora about more than her estranged relationship with her father. Female characters in SFF who can stand their own against their male counterparts, especially as integral characters, are sadly not as common as we’d like them to be. Which is where Nora steps in, and challenges all perceptions about who and what she is. As I’ve said, within the narrative, she’s an actor and not a reactor, and for me this makes her into a very vital character, someone who packs a wallop of character-agency. Her scenes in The Blue Blazes are some of the highlights of the novel.” — Shadowhawk, The Founding Fields

“Wendig writes with blunt force choreography, full of brutally disturbing descriptions, and wrecking ball action. Noir sensibilities are in full force here, and Wendig uses them brilliantly to craft a portrait of a New York that is at the same time instantly recognizable and disturbingly alien.” — The 52 Review

“Seamlessly blending urban fantasy, crime noir and artisanal butchery, The Blue Blazes is one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time. It’s an exciting twist on the normal urban fantasy tropes, one that breathes some new life into Urban Fantasy’s blood-drinking corpse.” — BuzzyMag

“The Blue Blazes is a fun, fast-paced novel that blends the best of noir, a Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, and melodrama into something special.” — Fantasy Faction

“In the end, The Blue Blazes is a blast, an awesome, smartly written novel that far exceeds the sum of its parts and transcends those things with which it is similar to be an excellent novel on its own merits. Sure to end up on my favorite reads list at the end of this year.” — SFFWorld

“Suffice it to say that Chuck Wendig has moved from one of the many Un-Heard-Of-So-Don’t-Care seats in the back of my brain to occupying a spot in the far less populated Important-Writers section up front.” — Elf-Machines From Hyperspace

“The world of The Blue Blazes is fantastic – think Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere written as a mob book – and as Wendig slowly reveals more and more of the demonic underbelly of New York you can’t help but go along for the ride. At turns creepy and horrifying (but always entertaining), The Blue Blazes is a must-read. I’m kicking myself for not checking out Wendig’s work before now. Don’t make the same mistake I did.” — All Things Urban Fantasy

“The Blue Blazes shows us Hell in Technicolor, and each pigment jumps straight off the page in High Definition Wendig-Vision. It’s brilliant stuff, and I just hope there’s more to come from Mookie Pearl and the five pigments of the Underworld.” — Wilders Book Reviews

“In a credit to Wendig for how well he portrays this dysfunctional little family unit, I found myself hooked on their relationship and biting my nails by the end of the story, eager to find out what becomes of them.” — Over The Effing Rainbow

You Got Some Booksplainin’ To Do: Buckell On Bias In Self-Publishing

Tobias Buckell wrote a very smart and rational post (FEATURING CHARTS) about survivorship bias in self-publishing. Go read it. I’ll wait. I like the post a lot — Buckell frequently tickles my sweet spot in terms of being moderate and looking at the pro’s and con’s of both sides of the publishing fence (as I attempted to do here in this rather lengthy post.) I’d maybe argue that Smashwords isn’t the shining ideal in terms of data — but it’s also the only data we have.

This post generated some very interesting discussion over at Facebook, and one commenter there (who I like) said the following: “…if you have a thousand authors on the traditional path who make zilch, and a thousand authors on the indie path who publish their own book and make just a dollar, you know what? The indies are doing better. Something is better than nothing.”

Now, this is an idea I’ve seen put out there before.

It’s interesting.

But I don’t buy it.

Let’s pull this apart a little bit.

First, traditional authors don’t generally make zilch, though I understand the point — you don’t “choose” to traditionally publish so much as you “choose” to try to traditionally publish, and if you fail, you make no money. The suggestion here then is that indie publishers will at least make a dollar — which is maybe true, but you could just as easily lose money on a self-publishing endeavor presuming you start out right and invest some money (cover, editing, design, marketing, whatever). And generally speaking, those who are actually publishing traditionally are doing so with an advance in hand — usually north of five grand.

Second, that word again that keeps popping up — “better.” Like it’s a tug-of-war and one side wants to win. (Or, more appropriately to how it often feels: like it’s a big ol’ stinky-winky dick-waving contest MY PUBLISHING IS BIGGER THAN YOUR PUBLISHING *waggle waggle waggle*.) Let’s all take a deep breath and say it: neither path is better than the other. They’re two very viable options and different authors will do better walking divergent paths. We don’t all have to march lockstep and drink the fucking Flavor-Aid and pick one cult over another. Embrace publishing agonisticism. Don’t judge. You’re not better. I’m not better. The schoolyard finger-pointing is eye-rollingly tiresome at this point.

Third, the indication that “better” is bound up with “money” — but then at the same time suggesting that a few bucks here and there is “better than nothing.” Bare minimum is not a great selling point for anything and it’s not a very good reason to self-publish. We self-publish for a variety of reasons — control, risk, cutting out middle-men, etc. — but one of them should not be “I really need a roll of quarters for the downstairs laundry.”

Listen, if you have a book, and it’s done, you can try to hold out for the traditional advance or you can take a shot at generating some income now with self-publishing. Neither is wrong. Neither is a guarantee. You may make no money, a moderate amount of money, or enough money to build a house out of actual money (“MY FLOOR IS TILED WITH SUSAN B. ANTHONY DOLLARS, MY CURTAINS ARE STITCHED-TOGETHER BENJAMINS, AND MY JACUZZI SPITS OUT MOLTEN ZINC FROM MELTED PENNIES — wait, don’t get the jacuzzi, it’s just for show”).

But don’t judge others for the path they take. Find what works for you, what suits you, and do it. We should all be very happy that these options exist, by the way — self-publishers should be happy that traditional publishing is still an option. Why? Because if that goes away, the incentive to keep self-publishers happy by companies like Amazon fades away. A rich, diverse playing field means more people are finding success all over.

Look at it another way: some people will want to sell their own lemonade, some people would rather work for a lemonade company, others still would rather formulate their own lemonade recipe and sell that through a lemonade recipe distributor (okay, we’re probably entering the stuff of fiction here — LEMONPUNK, BABY), but you get my point. We wouldn’t want everyone to have to punch a time clock just as we wouldn’t want everyone to have to start their own entrepreneurial businesses. It’s all good. Relax.

Oh, and last point: don’t automatically listen to what somebody tells you as what you “should” do. Think. Process. Weigh the options. Personal anecdote time (meaning, works for me, not for you): I had an easy time getting an agent for Blackbirds but a hard time selling it to a publisher at first. And I heard along the way the cries to self-publish. (And oh did I consider it.) Then, even after I had gotten the deal, the occasional comment persisted — I should’ve self-published, it would’ve earned me more than the standard genre fiction advance. Blah blah blah.

Now, I don’t have any time travel devices handy (Delorean, Police Box, cosmic treadmill, temporal suppository) — but since that time, I’ve sold the rights of the book to a handful of foreign markets (with another undergoing bidding even now) and have sold the film/TV rights (one day I look forward to that announcement because it’s damn exciting). And I’ve made more money on that book and its sequel than you would imagine. I’m still making money on that book. And it was a small genre release that continues to do nice — if not overwhelming — numbers in the marketplace.

The point isn’t that I did that and you should do that, too. The only thing that I did that I hope you’ll emulate is that I looked long and hard at it and made the decision I felt best suited me as a writer and the book I had written. It paid off.

The point is that I’m happy with the choice I made. I’m glad I didn’t pull the trigger and just publish it in the same way I’m glad I didn’t publish any of the five novels I’d written before that one (which is another piece of fucked-up frequently-seen self-publisher advice: “Just press publish! Better to make money than to sit in a drawer somewhere!”). Some turds are better flushed, people. My earlier books were stinkers – unfit for public shaming.

Further, I’m glad I did self-publish my Atlanta Burns series. Because that led me to new audience, new skills, and to new opportunities (Kickstarter, Amazon Children’s).

Let each writer and each writer’s book find its own path.

Examine all sides. Look to the failures and the successes.

Then jump.

The End.

* — be advised, Tobias invented the word “Booksplaining.” Please incorporate it into your publishing slang going forward or you will be violently Tasered THANK YOU GOODBYE.

An Examination Of The Wily “Book Blurb”

Book blurbs are strange territory for a writer: we go to other authors and solicit from them the time to read our (as yet unpublished) stories and the effort and marketing savvy to write a capable sales blurb for the book (which will go on the cover, inside the cover, or on the web).

You hate to even ask for blurbs because you’re forced to blacken your shame sensors with the heel of a boot just to get up the gumption to ask other authors (many of whom are writers you respect, even adore) to kind of become… advertising shills for your book.

They, as the authors granting blurbs, are ideally hoping to be curators in a way similar to (if also larger than) the retweet — the hope on Twitter is that someone retweets something because it’s content they find interesting and compelling, not because of some kind of back-scratching favor. And so it is with blurbs: you want that author not to provide a blurb to you or anybody else as a favor but because they actually want potential readers (including their own) to see that they have given it something of a seal of approval.

As a blurb writer it’s like, well, okay, I don’t just want to sound like a shill — “Better than Cats! I’ll read it again and again!” — and you want to put a little bit of your voice into it but not so much you’re sounding like you want to show off a fucking promotional blurb. It’s not all about you, right? And you certainly don’t want to put anything that could even sniff a little bit of negativity (“Brilliant book despite its poopy third act!”), nor do you want to cram it into a niche (“Canadian meth addicts will love it!”). You want to say something about the book without it sounding really generic (“It is a book that has many words put together in great sentences!”) but also don’t want to get specific (“ROSEBUD IS A FUCKING SLED”).

So, blurbs are weird. Asking for them. Writing them.

It gets even weirder when you consider that sometimes, authors don’t even write the blurbs. (Sometimes editors or agents will write them on behalf of authors who may or may not have even read the books.) And sometimes blurbs are culled from reviews or statements online. And, once in a blue moon, you see one of those blurbs from a mega-star author on a not-mega-star book (“This book was the holy tits!” — J.K. Rowling) and you’re like, how the hell did that happen? Did someone have incriminating evidence? Did they get J.K. Rowling really drunk one night on creme de menthe and they recorded whatever insane blurbs fell out of her mouth? Is there some other J.K. Rowling? Maybe some hair stylist from Reseda?

Anyway.

Couple questions, then.

Writers: what do you want in a blurb? And what do you aim for when you write one?

Readers: what do you like in a blurb? What catches your attention and sells the book? Further: are there any authors whose blurbs carry significant weight with you — and why?

Flash Fiction Challenge: Must Contain Psychic Powers

Last week’s challenge: “The Random Fantasy Character.“

Right now I’m neck-deep in the next Miriam Black book, which of course features the aforementioned Miriam: a psychic girl who can see how and when someone is going to die just by touching that person. She’s angry and vulgar and dangerously proactive and — well, she’s a lot of fun to write.

Psychic powers are a hoot, really.

Hers is pretty subtle — lots of psychological horror.

It’s not like she’s setting people on fire with her mind.

But maybe you want to write about that.

So, here’s how this works. I’m going to list 20 psychic powers at the bottom of this post. Feel free to roll a d20 to pick a random one or just grab the one you think it most awesome (though let’s be honest: random is more fun). If you need to know what it is: well, Google is your best friend. And your prom date.

Your story must include one — and only one — of the psychic powers mentioned.

You have  one week, as always. Due by May 31st, noon EST.

Write ~1000 words.

Post on your online space.

Link back here.

Ta-da.

And now, the list of psychic powers:

Clairvoyance
Pyromancy
Cryomancy
Telepathy
Psychometry
Faith or Psychic Healing
Precognition
Telekinesis
Mediumship
Levitation
Astral Projection
Bilocation
Teleportation
Aura Reading
Divination
Retrocognition
Past-Life Regression
Mind Control
Dream Control
Psychic Empathy (aka an Empath)

Ten Questions About Dangerous Games, By Matt Forbeck

Matt Forbeck is one of the hardest working and utterly tireless sonosabitches in games and fiction. I think he’s attached to one out of every seven Kickstarter projects. Last I checked, he’s starting his 365 Novels In One Year project, where he writes 365 novels in a year. Or something like that. Regardless, the latest fruits of his Kickstarter labors is a novel set at the gaming convention known as Gen Con, and here he answers the dreaded ten questions:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

Matt Forbeck: award winning author and game designer. I’ve been creating games for something over twenty years and writing novels for something less than ten. I’m probably best known for my three novels with Angry Robot: Amortals, Vegas Knights, and Carpathia, but I’ve also written tie-in novels for D&D, Blood Bowl, Guild Wars, and Leverage.

On top of all that, I write for video games (Marvel Heroes, Ghost Recon Online, etc.), toys (Star Trek Mission Utility Belt), and comics (Magic: The Gathering). Plus, I run Kickstarters to help me self-publish other novels. Last year, I tried to write a dozen of them for my 12 for ’12 challenge. I fell short and only wrote ten novels, nine comic scripts, and an assortment of shorter work. So, at least I fail well.

In my home life, I’m the happily married father of five kids. That includes a 14-year-old boy and a set of 10-year-old quadruplets. (Given what I do for a living, it’s funny that the craziest thing about my life is really my kids.)

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Dangerous Games is a trilogy of thrillers set at Gen Con, the largest tabletop gaming convention in America. It starts with How to Play.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

Literally? Kickstarter. I ran Dangerous Games as the third of the four trilogies I Kickstarted last year.

More figuratively, it comes from the fact that I’ve been going to Gen Con since I was a kid. This summer will be my 32nd year in a row and my 11th as a guest of honor at the show. As with most writers, once you spend enough time in a place, you start to imagine how it could all go horribly wrong. That’s how I came up with Dangerous Games.

I actually had this trilogy itching around in the back of my skull for years, but I had planned to run a different story as my third 12 for ’12 drive. I’d chatted with Jim Frenkel of Tor about it a while before, though, and he’d liked it, so I made sure to clear it with him before I started, just in case. He told me he wanted it, so I put that one aside for a while and picked up Dangerous Games instead.

That original notion, by the way, is called Loot Drop — a modern thriller with MMO elements — and it should be out from Tor in early 2015.

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

Gen Con is my favorite event of the year, and I know it better than just about anyone who’s not actually worked in-house for it. I’ve run booths at the show, created scores of events for it, and I’m even on the panel of folks who help select the industry guests of honor these days. The people who run the con — Peter Adkison, Adrian Swartout, Owen Seyler, and the rest of their team — are great friends of mine, people I love, and I think that glows throughout the book.

More to the point, Dangerous Games isn’t just about Gen Con but about the hero, Liam Parker, achieving his dreams of getting his tabletop game published. That’s something I’ve been through and have been helping other people with for decades. As my pal Robin Laws likes to say, the number of full-time freelance game designers in this world is less than the number of astronauts. When you narrow that to full-time tabletop RPG designers (which I once was), there are more Chinese astronauts.

It’s a rare but fascinating profession — as you well know, having done it for years yourself.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING DANGEROUS GAMES?

I had to decide whether or not to put myself into the book as a character. It seems like an egotistical thing to do, so my first instinct was to avoid it. The trouble is that everything I know about the convention comes straight from my experiences with it, and that’s one of the book’s selling points. Stripping me out of it didn’t make much sense and would have involved a lot of strenuous dancing around the subject to avoid it.

So I put myself in the book. I’m not there a lot, but enough to have fun with it. My wife and kids show up for a bit in the later books too. My pal Ken Hite agreed to serve as the part-time mentor for my hero, so I got to write dialog in Ken’s voice instead, which was worlds of fun.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING DANGEROUS GAMES?

This is the first piece of original fiction I’ve written that had absolutely zero fantastic elements in it. No magic, no monsters, and no tech more advanced than what most of us see every day. It forced me to find intriguing material more in the characters and their motivations than in the world building, which is something fantastic stories tend to feature, and I found that refreshing and fun.

I also had to deal with writing about lots of people I know well, most of whom I count as good friends. It’s interesting to write about them with compassion and empathy but still leaving their flaws and eccentricities on full display. I can only hope they recognize themselves and think that I treated them well.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT DANGEROUS GAMES?

I worked hard to capture the fact that Gen Con is a magical time for me. I really do love it more than a kid at Christmas. It’s a gathering of the gaming-geek tribe that transcends all of us, and it always inspires me and recharges my battery for another year of creating fun things to share with my friends. With Dangerous Games, I tried to put that front and center. It’s a dark story in some ways, but it’s painted against the background of the Best Four Days in Gaming.

I also loved putting so many of my friends in the book. I became more adventurous with the cameos as I went, and in the final book I wound up throwing in a slew of fantastic authors as part of the Writer’s Symposium at Gen Con — which I take part in too. Folks like John Scalzi, Brandon Sanderson, and Pat Rothfuss show up, and even Wil Wheaton pokes his head in for a bit.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

If and when I ever go back to writing thrillers at Gen Con, I’d take a whole different tack. I’d go with an ensemble cast of characters and a cunning mastermind running a secret game throughout the con, by which he hopes to take his revenge on them all. I considered doing that this time around, but I threw it out because I wanted to introduce readers to Gen Con first, and I needed a fresh-faced hero to accomplish that.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

I have a lot of favorites, but I’m going to go ahead and spoil everything with the last paragraph in the entire book. It’s actually not as much a spoiler as it’s a wink and nod to the readers, as everything’s been wrapped up well before that point. Anyhow, it reads:

“Well,” Matt said with a cunning glint in his eye. “Have you heard about this new thing called Kickstarter?”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

After Dangerous Games: How to Play — which is out now — I’m releasing two sequels: How to Cheat and How to Win. Those should all be out this summer. They each take place at Gen Con in consecutive years, and we get to see Liam grow as a designer and a hero through those three years. The first is a mystery novel, the second is a crime novel, and the third is over-the-top action. I call it Die Hard meets Gen Con.

Meanwhile, I’m finishing up my YA series of Monster Academy novels from my fourth Kickstarter. Those will be out later in the year. After that, I move on to Loot Drop for Tor. It’s a busy year.

Matt Forbeck: Website / @MForbeck

Dangerous Games: Amazon / B&N / Forbeck.com

Ten Questions About Vaporware, By Rich Dansky

One of my favorite things is looking around and seeing the success of the people I’ve “come up with,” for lack of a better term. Folks I wrote with in various gaming industries: folks like Mur Lafferty or, drum roll please, Rich Dansky. Rich is a guy responsible for a lot of games you probably love, and he’s also a helluva fiction writer. Here he is emerging from the ones and zeros to tell you about Vaporware:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I’m the one who knocks, and then, if you don’t answer, leaves a note saying I was there and will be back another time, and if you want me to bring pick anything up for you, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Beyond that, I’m a 14 year veteran of the video game industry with Red Storm/Ubisoft, working mainly on the Tom Clancy’sseries and games like Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell. Before that I spent four years in-house at White Wolf as a line developer on games like Wraith and Mind’s Eye Theatre. I’ve published six novels and a short story collection, I’ve got a scotch collection that is the envy of beast and man, and I spend far more time watching Finding Bigfoot than any rational human being really should.

Also, I live in North Carolina, I’m married to the brilliant and lovely statistician Dr. Melinda Thielbar, and I once shoved my hands into a vat of liquid nitrogen. That about covers it.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

What happens when a video game refuses to be cancelled? Blue Lightning is back, and it wants something only its creator can give it.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

It comes from a lot of late nights and long hours. It comes from a lot of “no shit, there we were” war stories swapped with friends at other studios on other projects. It comes from a gamedev I know telling me “Don’t tell my wife, but if it was a choice between my family and doing something cool, I’d risk my family.” It comes from thinking to yourself, “good, my wife is going out of town so I can work later”, and from getting the call two days after you get married that you need to get back on the road again. And it comes from looking around at a roomful of coworkers late at night when no one wants to be the first one to go home.

At the same time, it comes from the passion of working in games – of banding together with a dozen or a hundred or a thousand other people to make something that is expressly designed to help people have fun. It comes from watching something go from a squiggle on a whiteboard through prototyping and development to the point where you see it in-game and it’s suddenly real. And it comes from seeing that creative vision manifested and real.

There are a lot of things I love about working in video game development – the projects I’ve worked on, the collaborations I’ve gotten to be a part of, the places I’ve gotten to go – but at the same time it asks an awful lot of you, and unless you draw and guard your boundaries, it’s going to keep asking for you to give more. I’ve lived that more than once, and I’ve had friends go through it at a dozen different studios, and it takes a toll on both the gamedevs and the people in their lives.

And yet we keep coming back for more. And that, I suppose, is where the story really came from.

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

Two days after I got married, I got a phone call from work saying they needed me at a third party studio out of the country. And I went. I know the perils of work-life imbalance in the game industry pretty well, and I’m painfully aware how much of that can be self-authored. Between what I’ve seen and done, and the stories I’ve been told by friends and professional peers, I think I was perfectly situated at the intersection of skill and experience when Vaporware decided it needed to be written.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING VAPORWARE?

The hardest thing was, I think, being so attached to the material. So much of it felt fraught with significance. In a lot of ways, it felt like I was putting this out there for the gamedev community as a whole, and if I’d gotten it wrong it would have been like I was letting them down.   That’s not to say that I’m claiming to speak for all gamedevs with this, but there’s a lot of misunderstanding about what we do. So this was a chance to show that, yeah, we do work hard and we do take what we do seriously as professionals. Maybe too seriously sometimes.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING VAPORWARE?

I learned to trust the material. The book went through a lot of versions, and I think for a long time I was over-cautious with it. Maybe I didn’t want to risk getting it wrong, maybe I wanted to show off too many of the nuts and bolts, but I did a lot of over-steering on the manuscript through about the first five or six drafts. Eventually I had to just trust myself that I knew the story I was trying to tell, step away from any externally imposed direction, and let myself write what I already knew I was going to. The story was always going to end this way. It just took a long time to come to grips with that, versus where I might have foolishly wished it to go instead.

As my wife says, the horror of my fiction is that people don’t change.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT VAPORWARE?

Vaporware is such a personal project – they say “write what you know”, not necessarily “write what you’ve been immersed in completely for a decade and a half ‘cause you may not have the best perspective on the thing when you’re done” – that in a lot of ways it was difficult for me to look at without attaching real-world associations to whatever I was looking at. I mean, it was definitely a labor of love, but so was Van Gogh hacking off his ear. It wasn’t until I put it in the hands of other game developers I knew for feedback and they told me that it felt it rang true that I was really able to relax around it and start enjoying it.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

I broke one of my cardinal rules writing Vaporware, which is to say I started editing before I’d finished the full manuscript. And of course those edits changed other things, which changed other things, which necessitated more edits, and it was /this/ close to just sort of spiraling out of control into the land of “someday I’m gonna finish”.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” she said briskly, stepping toward the door. She stopped and looked at me over her shoulder. “You’re going to pretend that you didn’t tell me what you told me. I’m going to pretend that you were just working late, like you always do. We both can pretend that I’ve already nagged you about spending too much time at the office, and that will be the end of it. Because, honestly, a little more suspicion and resentment is going to do this relationship a lot less harm than you asking me to believe you saw one of your friends screwing a ghost.” She blew me a kiss. “Don’t forget to pay the Time Warner bill, OK?”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

Well, J.C. Hay and I have wrapped up our sasquatch noir detective novel, and Splinter Cell: Blacklist is coming out in August. Beyond that, I’m working on a vampire novel and a raft of short stories, and trying to catch up with all the book reviews I owe PW and Sleeping Hedgehog and everyone else. Honestly, when it comes to writing projects, I’m like a cat with a laser pointer. Lots of pouncing, lots of slamming into walls and telling everyone I meant to do that.

Which, of course, I totally did.

Rich Dansky: Website / @RDansky

Vaporware: Amazon / B&N