Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 211

The Terribleminds Guide To Hitting On The Ladies

“Hey, Chuck,” you ask. “I’d like to ask, how do I hit on the ladies?“

SPOILER WARNING: DON’T.

Let’s rewind a bit.

I went to the grocery store as I am wont to do on a Tuesday. I go to the store, frequently when I am hungry which means I come home with 37 bags of marshmallows, an entire butchered kangaroo, a half-keg of chocolate syrup, a backpack full of Ranch dressing, and a mysterious out-of-date jar of pickled wolf gonads. It’s common now I go to the store and I see some of the same faces — people who are on the same weekly circuit that I am, I guess.

Well, one of these is a young woman… I dunno, early 20s?

So, she’s looking at cold drinks, juices, that sort of thing.

And there’s a tall reedy dude there in a tight-white t-shirt and he’s helping — “helping?” — her choose something from the case, and at first I think he’s a boyfriend but it becomes apparent that he’s not when I realize he’s hitting on her. Asking for her name, sidling up close, kind of using that soft smooth jazz voice that some dudes use, like, “Oh, I’m totally non-threatening, listen to the velvet tones of my buttery vocal pipes.”

The drink case isn’t super-huge so I’m not standing right there next to the two of them, but what I hear him say next is roughly this:

“I know you don’t get to look in the mirror but I want you to know you’re beautiful.”

Oh, maybe I buried the lede here?

SHE’S BLIND.

I don’t mean that euphemistically, like, “She’s blind to his attraction,” or, “She just doesn’t get it, man,” I mean, she’s actually blind. She’s got the tappy cane and everything. People help her in the store because, well, she’s blind. Employees help. Other shoppers help. It’s all very nice.

Until Doctor Douchebro comes along and hits on her.

And that’s what he’s doing. Hitting on her.

Hitting on a blind woman.

At a grocery store.

With his smarmy come-on line designed, clearly, to hit on blind women.

She was very nice. She dealt with him and politely shut him down (not that he deserved such tender handling, nor was she obligated to “be nice” to him, I’m just telling the story as I witnessed it) and she went her way and he went his. He didn’t stalk her or double-down on creep-town. It was a brief encounter and nothing particularly unsavory came from it.

Just the same –

Gents, don’t hit on women.

I know, now you’re saying, “BUT THAT’S HOW I GET MY PENIS TOUCHED,” and maybe you think that’s true. I realize there’s a certain mode of dating advice that suggests men must show confidence and be clear and forthright with their attraction. But “confidence” is a whole lot different than “aggression,” and hitting on someone is a whole lot more like the latter than the former. Note that verb: hitting — itself the language of violence, like you’re walking up and just bashing her about the head and neck with your sexual desire, like you’re clubbing a seal.

You can be confident. Hell, just going up and talking to a stranger is an act of confidence.

Which is what you should do to people to whom you are attracted.

Talk to them. Connect with them on a human level. They’re not a socket for your plug. You’re a person. They’re a person. Go form an emotional-social tether before you go clumsily trying to bed them. I’m not saying every encounter has to end in marriage. Hey, you wanna just hook-up and find other people who just wanna hook-up, well, dang, I hope you two crazy kids find a way to slap your parts together, whatever those parts might be. Just the same, the way we find those people is by connecting. And being human. And recognizing that they’re human too. And not just treating them like prey animals who owe you a pound of flesh for your hunting efforts.

“Hitting on them” is a thing you do when you see them as a target, a victim, a receptacle for your pleasure. It’s dismissive and unpleasant and often embarrassing for all parties.

Don’t be creepy. Don’t be an asshole.

Aggression is hitting on people.

Confidence is talking to them and knowing that’s enough.

YMMV, IMHO, etc. so forth.

How To Maximize Your Word Count And Write More Every Day

Man, that blog title is soulless, isn’t it? I tried coming up with something funny — something about word vomit? something-something faster pussycat, write, write? — and it just wasn’t happening. So, despite sounding like some kind of mid-90s infomercial, I figure it’s best to just say what the post is actually about so we’re all on the same page and nobody thinks I’m going to vomit on them or throw inky-pawed cats at their head. Right? Right. So –

A few months back I wrote up a zero-fuckery writing plan of 350 words per day that gets you a novel in a year. It is the slow-and-steady method — it’s you chipping away at your Magnum Opus (which is Latin for “Giant Penguin”) until one day a novel is staring up at you, goo-slick and trembling, a creative effort finally born into your world.

The other day, though, I had a short Twitter discussion (a “twitscussion”) with a few other authors based on a tweet by the smoldering, sardonic lothario, Andrew T. Shaffer — who, point of fact, shares the same middle name as Craig T. Nelson, which is “Tits.” Herr Doktor Shaffer is at Romantic Times, where he was listening to David Morrell speak. Shaffer reported:

“I know people who are doing a book or two a year.” – David Morrell on fast writers “Some writers here do six.” – audience member #RT13

— Andrew Shaffer (@andrewtshaffer) May 3, 2013

The discussion that ensued was about writing fast and how many books an author can cram into a given year. Most folks seem to write one, maybe two. Matt Forbeck writes like, I think 52 books a year? That guy must write on the toilet, in the car, in his sleep.

I think last year I wrote… four books? Plus some script work. And not to mention around 250,000 words here at the blog alone. By the end of May this year, I will have written three novels — one of them a 120,000-word Leviathan of YA cornpunk weirdness.

I generally write about 3,000 brand new shiny so-fresh-and-so-clean words per day.

Some of you may want to escalate your word count and punt that slow-and-steady approach right in the See You Next Tuesday. As such, if you want to write MORE FASTER NOW NOW NOW, well, shit, the best I can do is pretend I’m an expert and offer up some tips.

Hide your children. Let us begin.

Do Your Writing In The Morning

Writing in the morning has more potential than writing in the evening and here’s why: writing at the end of the day means the candle is burning down. The timer is ticking. You’re watching the horizon eat the sun and with it, the remaining hours before sweet, sweet slumber.

Ah, but write in the morning? You have the entire day ahead of you. The day is practically bloated with hours — fuck, a whole 24 of them, last I heard. (Unless you’re on some kind of distant interstellar colony reading this in the future, at which point I hope you’re enjoying your 30-hour-days and are also staying safe from the Slabbering Meteorsquid — they’re such assholes, those guys. I mean, really. Acid blood? HELLO, UNORIGINAL.)

Write at the end of the day, you’re racing the clock.

Write at the fore of the day, you own the clock.

Wake Up An Hour Earlier

Morning writing might mean waking up an hour earlier. Over time, as the septic infection called “adulthood” has seeped into my marrow, I’ve managed to get up earlier and earlier — 8AM to 7AM to 6:30 to 6 and now sometimes 5:30 or even 5 o’clock in the goddamn morning. I didn’t even know the morning had a five o’clock. I was like, WHAT CRASS HOUR IS THIS? DO I SEE A FIVE UPON MY WATCH? IS THIS DINNER TIME? IS THERE AN ECLIPSE? WHERE IS MY APERITIF?

Still, I have a toddler. The toddler is a voracious time-eater. He will wolf down your attention and productivity and time by dint of his cuteness. (And occasionally by dint of his wild, banshee-like howls of teething rage.) Getting up earlier is me trying to beat him to wakefulness.

And I get a lot more done when I get up earlier. By the time the tiny human wakes up, I usually have 1500 words already written and one cup of coffee already in the well of my belly.

Coffee

If I don’t drink coffee in the morning, I don’t write nearly as much. Coffee is the Earth’s blood. IT LUBRICATES THE GEARS. Without it, everything seizes up — a fly stuck in peanut butter. I don’t drink a ton of it — which means that when I really need a high-octane writing day with a lot of word count, I can drink an extra cup (or seven) and actually reap the rewards.

Snatch Time From Life’s Thieving Jaws And Use It To Write

When life gives you no time, MAKE TIME TRAVELING LEMONADE.

That can’t be right. But it’ll have to do.

What I mean is, life is a low place that fills up quickly with whatever comes its way — water, sand, mud, elk scat, the tears of all the world’s children, whatever. Your time will swiftly fall prey to the nibbles and pecks of the Things-To-Do-Bird: you gotta go to work, go to the store, take out the trash, artificially inseminate that baboon HEY I SAID ARTIFICIALLY PUT YOUR PANTS BACK ON. Time fills up fast. Life is greedy and eager to exploit.

If you’re going to write a lot, you’re going to need to feint and duck, stick and move, and reach in to grab fistfuls of time-flesh and use it for your own sinister purposes: in this case, writing. Got a lunch break? Write. Sitting at a long stop light? Take a few quick voice notes on your phone. Lounging around in post-coital baboon afterglow? Put some words to paper, goddamnit.

I used to work a job where I started out as customer service and ended up as a “systems manager,” whatever that means, and during my several years at the company I would constantly be hiding the windows of the work I was supposed to be doing for the company and opening a word processor window and typing out a quick 250 words here and there. A dick move against the company, though they were known for their own dick moves against employees.

Hey, whatever. WRITER GONNA WRITE.

Schedules And Deadlines

God, that’s like the most boring-est version of Dungeons & Dragons ever. “You’ve been attacked by the Gelatinous Cubicle! Your sword is +4 against spreadsheets! Wade into the Temple of Excelemental Evil!” Blech. Still. Still! Having a schedule keeps me sane and helps me meet my writing goals. I toss all the projects I need to write into a spreadsheet. I calculate them by day how much I have to write to get ‘em done. I mark deadlines and potential start dates. I doodle wangs and vajeenies in the margins just to keep it real.

This helps me hit my targets and keep me on track.

Plan, Prep, Plot, Scheme

I outline not because I like it but because I must. I am a pantser by heart, a plotter by necessity. I have to know at least a little bit where my story is going — and here’s the mileage that it gets you: when you come to the page clueless in the morning, you spend some of your time just dicking around. Thinking. Starting. Stopping. More thinking. Drinking vodka (aka “Daddy’s Magic Muse Water”). Napping. A lot of “not actually writing, yet” activities.

Ah, but if you start the day with a mission statement already in play thanks to an outline, you can jump in, eschew any planning the day might require, and just start writing. The goal is to give as much of your time to actually telling the story as you can.

Politely Ask For The Time You Need

You will not get the time you need to write unless you ask for it.

It’s that simple.

Nobody’s psychic. You want to write, you need to tell your wife, husband, children, pets, live-in love-slave, robot butler — “Hey, I really need an hour today to do this because it’s important to me.” Part of it’s because everyone assumes it’s a hobby. They assume you’ll fill your copious free time (HA HA HA FREE TIME GOOD ONE, ME *self-five*) with writing as you would if you were building model airplanes or doing Nude Sunbathing Full-Contact Sudoku.

If it’s important to you, you need to gesticulate wildly and ask for the time.

And if they don’t give it to you, well, then that becomes a whole different conversation.

Write With Your Internal Editor Gagged And Shoved In A Box

Editing as you go is a perfectly viable way to write.

It is not a perfectly viable way to write quickly and to maximize your word count.

Editing as you go is recursive — write a thing, go back over that same thing once, twice, as many times as your obsessive nature demands. You’re treading the same ground. Walking in the same footprints. Like I say: totally viable in terms of process if that’s what works. But it doesn’t move you forward very quickly and that’s the goal, here, at least in terms of this post –

To write a lot, and to do it with some speed.

Which means you need to shut your internal editor up. Elbow him in the throat and shove him in a duffel bag. Remind him his time will come. The editor always gets the last laugh.

Silence Self-Doubt With Hollowpoint Bullets Packed With Your Indifference

Worse than your internal editor is that spiritual goblin that nests over your creative and intellectual impulse centers, using his greasy ovipositor to plant quivering eggs of sulfurous self-doubt all over your well-being. You sit there and write and hate everything about what you’re doing and want to punch your characters, your paragraphs, your whole story, yourself.

Self-doubt is a sticky mud, indeed.

It will slow you down.

And, tut-tut-tut, we cannot have that. No we cannot.

You need to shut that shit up. Stopper your self-doubt up. Brick the demon into a dark grotto, Cask of Amontillado-style. And you say, well, great, but how do I do that? And here I don’t have any great advice. The secret, actually, isn’t in the silencing of your self-doubt.

The secret is in ignoring it.

We’re not particularly smart about our own authorial worth while in the midst of writing something. We love what sucks and hate what works and at least for me, during writing a project my headspace starts to look like the back of my television: a thousand wires braided together, no idea which one is to the cable box and the Xbox and that’s the optical audio and the HEY IS THAT LICORICE ew black licorice ptoo ptoo ptoo. Point is, you start to lose the sense of what feeling is moored to what part of your story. It’s all just a tangle of wires.

Your self-doubt just ain’t that goddamn effective. Or accurate.

It’s like the weatherman. It’s rarely right and yet we listen anyway.

Plus, even when it is right, trying to address it in the middle of the draft is a waste of time. You have time to examine your work and see what holds water and what doesn’t, and that time is called “after you finished the first draft of that thing that you’re writing.”

So, ignore it. It’s going to be there. Pretend you don’t hear it. Tune it out. It is rarely meaningful or efficient. It’s damn sure not helpful. So: pay that fucking asshole no mind at all.

That’s maybe the biggest secret to writing a lot of words really, really fast: you need to blacken your self-doubt sensors with a boot and — say it with me –

JUST. KEEP. WRITING.

Hopefully, these tips will get you writing a little more per day — even carving out an additional 500 words in a day is a good start. Again, that’s not to say this is for everyone: but sometimes deadlines or aspirations demand you hit the accelerator. And these tips may help you do it.

Gods & Monsters: Unclean Spirits Is Available Now!

Gods & Monsters: Unclean Spirits now exists in your universe. It has crossed all known boundaries. It has penetrated your reality membrane.

Let’s get this part out of the way right now:

You can buy it at:

Amazon!

B&N!

From your local bookseller using Indiebound!

And quite likely other Word-Merchants around meatspace and within the Internet.

You can read the first chapter here. (io9)

You can read another separate excerpt here. (Tor.com)

The Book

Abaddon said to me, “We’d like you to shepherd a brand new shared world series into existence.”

I said, of course, fuck yeah.

They had that name — Gods & Monsters. The world hit me like a Zeusian thunderbolt out of the ether: I am a sucker for mythology, and thought everyone would get a helluva lot of mileage out of a world where the gods and goddesses, where the monsters and heroes, had all been booted out of their respective spiritual homes and were forced to fuck around here on Earth, their power cut to sub-divine levels but their hunger for power magnified tenfold.

The potential of the series would be, of course, that mythology offers us a wealth of origin material to take and tweak, and future writers in the series wouldn’t be beholden to some 400-page story bible written by me — why invent a whole new pantheon when we can get a lot of common mileage out of the deities and entities that already exist in the world’s stories?

Still, I thought, that’s great for a series but I still need a book out of it — and here I was like, I don’t want it to be about some boring-ass “Everyman.” Some folks can handle that tabula rasa character template well, but for my mileage, I want a character who can do things and who really, really wants something. And so was born the character of Cason Cole, a gone-to-pot MMA fighter whose life and family have been ripped apart by the manipulations of the gods — and now he wants revenge. But is he still being manipulated?

Who is the scarred-face man called the Cicatrix?

Will he fall prey to the Narcissistic adorations of the goddess Aphrodite?

Who is his real father?

Will his wife and son ever be free from the curse that causes them to despise him?

Where is Coyote’s penis?

Is that a unicorn? (Answer: yes, it is a unicorn.)

And the most important question of all:

HOW DO YOU KILL A GOD?

Warning: Contains God-Wangs And Divine Vaginas

It’s not a sexy book, but for reals, I talk a lot about god wangs and goddess hoo-hah.

It in fact contains the following passage, to whet your, erm, appetite:

“I was tamed by it. I was tamed like a temple dog, for it was glorious. Soft and deep. Infinite folds. And when it needed to, it would breathe fire. It could strip flesh from bone with its bitter secretions. Serpents would crawl from her inner channel, serpents with many heads and venom so potent that even a drop of it could slay the Mighty Humbaba.” His voice gets small, speaks with love, lust, reverence: “Her womanhood was beautiful. I bowed before it. I worshiped at it as if it was a fount of sacred water. My tongue, my mouth, my teeth, my fingers, I would sometimes crawl deep within that charnel space and let her give birth—I would be born upon the cold floor of her palace, wet and squalling, and she would pick me up and kiss me and I would be… complete.”

So, there you go.

Speaking Of Wangs…

Pat Kelleher also wrote a sort-of-pseudo-sequel e-novella to Unclean Spirits –

It’s called “Drag Hunt.”

In it, Coyote searches for his lost penis.

Which makes more sense if you read Unclean Spirits.

Kelleher is a helluva writer.

And Finally, The Last And Most Curious Disclaimer

I get some folks who tell me that they like this blog and so they support it by buying my books — which is lovely, thank you! — but here I’d make a note that you buying this book will not necessarily put more money in my pocket. This book was work-for-hire, which is not to say I did not love writing it (I did!) nor to say I don’t want you reading it (I do!), but just in terms of the business arrangement I do not get anything “per sale,” so to speak. Further, I’ve had some folks ask me why I was concentrating more of my marketing fire on the Star Destroyer that is The Blue Blazes (May 28th!) and it is for that very reason — a mercenary capitalist swine decision based on the fact that I cannot devote too much time toward self-promotion lest I get noisy, and so I must choose instead to focus it on the book that puts more actual money in my actual pockets. This is a bit crass, but I figure it’d better to say it instead of giving the impression that I’m not somehow proud of Unclean Spirits, which I am.

And hopefully you urban fantasy / horror / crime fans will find something to love in both books.

Actually, there’s probably some interesting mileage to be had in comparing the two books…

Hm.

Anyway!

Just wanted that said. Hope you dig the book. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

So, How’s The Writing Going, Cats And Kittens?

Check-up time.

TURN YOUR HEAD AND COUGH.

Maybe that’s a different kind of check-up.

Still, I like these gowns.

ASSLESS.

Which is really a misnomer, isn’t it? Because they’re not ass-less. They’re ass-ful. By revealing the buttocks, you have wildly increased the assfulness quotient, yeah?

Whatever.

What I’m trying to say is, hey! Writer-types!

How’s it going?

What are you writing?

What kinds of things are you finding hard in your writing?

What’s easy?

What’s surprising?

What have you learned?

What do you need?

How is the whole writer’s existence?

Let’s hear ‘em. Shout up from the trenches: how goes the penmonkey thing?

The Blue Blazes: Offspring Of The Void

“The monsters of the Abyss. Offspring of the Void. The children of the Hungry Ones, of the Deep Shadows, of Those Who Eat. Birthed from the Maw-Womb, given life down in the dark – - wriggling, screaming, baying for blood and singing lamentations to the lack of light. The gobbos, or goblins, those most common denizens of the Great Below, half-mindless, willing to eat their own young, a tribe or hive of peons and pawns, Hell’s own foot-soldiers. The Trogbodies or troglodytes, blind golems of stone and clay and silt. The Snakefaces, or Nagas and Naginis, those hidden seducers, those worms in the rock…”

The Blue Blazes

Coming May 27th, 2013.

Pre-order:

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

(text by Chuck Wendig; art artifacts by Joey Hi-Fi)

Shirt Sale For You Word-Wanderers Out Yonderers

I offer t-shirts through the Merch link here at the site, and there you’ll find:

The ART HARDER, MOTHERFUCKER t-shirt…

And –

The CERTIFIED PENMONKEY t-shirt.

I sell these t-shirts through Zazzle. (Any style or size or color you choose.)

Today, for some reason, Zazzle has a 50% off sale.

So, if you want to buy a shirt…

Use code CINCOTSHIRTS to get that discount.

I have no idea what Cinco de Mayo has to do with a shirt discount, but fuck it.

Half-off is half-off.

Please to enjoy.

The Grand Adventure To Find Your Voice

I completed a really cool interview over at 52Reviews, and there I answered a question about voice, and the answer, I think, may be of some use to readers here. Go check out the interview, as I talk a bit about writing craft and The Blue Blazes and also about pointing guns at ponies. (Don’t worry, the pony is still alive. Sheesh.)

Anyway, here’s that quote on voice:

“Every author decides to go on a grand adventure one day, and that grand adventure is to find her voice. She leaves the comfort of her own wordsmithy and she traipses through many fictional worlds written by many writers and along the way she pokes through their writings to see if her voice is in there somewhere. She takes what she reads and she mimics their voices, taking little pieces of other authors with her in her mind and on the page.

Is her voice cynical? Optimistic? Short and curt, or long and breezy? She doesn’t know and so she reads and she writes and she lives life in an effort to find out.

This adventure takes as long as it takes, but one day the author tires of it and she comes home, empty-handed, still uncertain what her voice looks like or sounds like.

And there, at home, she discovers her voice is waiting. In fact, it’s been there all along.

Your voice is how you write when you’re not trying to find your voice. Your voice is the way you write, the way you talk. Your voice is who you are, what you believe, what themes you knowingly and unknowingly embrace.

Your voice is you.

Search for it and you won’t find it. Stop looking and it’ll find you.”

Flash Fiction Challenge: Five Random Sentences

Last week’s challenge: “The Titles Have Been Chosen.”

This week is pretty simple.

Using a random sentence generator, I’m concocting five random sentences.

Pick one and use somewhere in your story for this week.

The five sentences are:

The shape fights the motionless ink.
The portrait cat sneakily gestured at everyone.
It walked inside the spaceship and then it sat down.
When does the family document the thunder?
The rough sex arrives by adhesive smoke.

So — you have ~1000 words.

Post online at your space, link back here.

You have one week — due by noon EST on Friday, May 10th.

 

 

Ten Questions About The Lives Of Tao, By Wesley Chu

Wesley Chu’s written a corker of a book — a twisted, funny head-tripper. And he’s a nice guy. Which means we all get to hate him. Talented? Capable? Nice? BURN HIS HOUSE DOWN. Ahem. Point is, Wes is here to answer some questions about his book, so I’ll get out of his way in 3… 2… 1…

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

Hello, I’m Wesley Chu. I’m a member of the Screen Actors Guild and a former stunt man, specializing in being the token Asian male. In other words, I play roles like businessman, doctor, computer geek, and getting my ass kicked. I’m good at that last one.

I get the token role because in every commercial with a group of guys, there always needs to be a token me alongside a token white guy, black guy, Latino guy, fat guy…etc. Do I mind? Nah, being token is my bread and butter.

Oh, I also wrote a book. My debut novel, The Lives of Tao, from Angry Robot Books, came out two days ago. By the way, this Saturday May 4th, I have a release party. If you’re within three hundred miles of Chicago, you should come. You don’t have to buy my book, but at least party with me.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Fat loser meets snarky alien. Gets in shape. Fights war over control of humanity’s evolution. Gets a girlfriend. Not in order of importance.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

I’ve always been a big history buff and one thing that fascinated me was the reasoning behind the events. Sure we know that Genghis and Alexander conquered faraway lands for fun, but why did they do it? Did Alexander really just enjoy visiting new places, meeting new people, beating the snot out of them, and then moving on? What were the political motives behind the Spanish Inquisition? How did the Black Plague positively affect humanity?

For me, the logic was more fascinating than the actual deed. Was it murder or manslaughter?

My original idea was to explore and retell that why, and tie it in with the present. How did we get to where we’re at now? The brouhaha going on in the Middle East is the perfect example of all the events that happened since World War II building up into the mess that it is today.

Now, what if there were wizards (the aliens) hiding behind the curtains pulling our strings. Toss in a fat lazy guy who hates his life, and let the fun begin.

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

This book is a mash up from many different parts of my life. The humor and verbal banter I attribute to my acting and those many dumb nights hanging out with my boys in Vegas. The fight scenes and action are from my martial arts and stunt work background. I choreographed and re-enact every fight scene in the book. Well, I used to be able to; I’m not so limber anymore.

Roen’s transformation from his meandering life to that of a secret agent was also a mental journey as well. I went through a similar transformation when I wasn’t happy with the direction my career and life was heading. I did some soul searching and took a step back to reevaluate my job and hobbies. That was when I decided to stop practicing martial arts and begin working on a book.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING THE LIVES OF TAO?

Lee Harris, my editor at Angry Robot, made a pretty difficult request during the acquisitions phase. He asked that I take out my historical plotline that followed Tao’s progression through several famous historical figures. The book was already a big boy so something had to give in order to trim it down to a svelte 464 pages. We ended up condensing those chapters into expositions and in the end, the story was definitely better for it. The robot overlords are indeed wise! The robot overlords plan to release the historical plotlines in their entirety at a later date as supplemental stories.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING THE LIVES OF TAO?

I learned that dreams do come true if I sell my soul to the devil. Besides that, I learned that in writing, often less is more.

In fight choreography, every move has to be specifically dictated, from the positioning to the beats to the physics. You mess up one of these and someone gets hurts. So, a good fight scene needs to be fully controlled and laid out.

That is exactly what you don’t want to do in a book fight scene.  When I first started writing The Lives of Tao, I wrote out everything in a fight. From hand placement to interlocking to foot positioning, it was all there. Basically, a skilled person could reenact the entire scene. And it was a bore to read. What works on film, television, and stage, does not necessarily work for books.

My wife said I was mentally masturbating when she first read it. My agent told me to look up some of the masters like Lee Childs. I did my research and went back to the drawing board, and ended up stripping the action scenes to its base structures and amped the emotional levels. It worked much better in the end. Thanks Jack Reacher!

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT THE LIVES OF TAO?

I’m very proud of the relationship between Roen and Tao. Sure one of them is a lovable disgusting slob and the other is a gas-life snarky alien symbiote, but their relationship is real. One of the early reviews of the book labeled it a bromance like the Odd Couple or Ocean’s Eleven.

Sure, why the hell not?

Regardless of all the sci-fi elements with aliens, spies, war, and conspiracies in the book, at its core The Lives of Tao is a story about relationships. One of the important rules I made in this world was that the alien cannot control the human. Therefore, if the alien wanted his host to do something, he has to ask. This story is less Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and more Firestorm (bonus geek points for getting the reference).

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

I would get out more often. I’m a pretty OCD kind of guy. When I focus on something, I’m basically a Phillips screwdriver; a single purpose driven machine. If I’m going to play Magic, I need to have every Magic card in existence. If I’m watching West Wing, I need to watch it all in one sitting. If I want to write a book, it’s all I think about.

I lost touch with a lot of friends writing The Lives of Tao. People got married, moved to the suburbs, had kids…etc… One day, my pasty white ass walked out of the house and the world had changed. Everyone’ was using this damn thing called an iPhone, and Terrell Owens was playing for the Cowboys. Whaaaa?

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

(This is only my favourite scene because it happened in real life. Roen is getting robbed by a mugger.)

He didn’t know what was going on or who was talking, but he was so scared right now that he did whatever this voice said. He took the two bottles and smashed them together.

Thunk. They didn’t break.

What the…? Roen looked down and tried again.

Thunk. Thunk. The damn bottles wouldn’t break.

“Oh, for the love of…” Roen gritted his teeth and tried again.

Thunk. Thunk. They finally shattered into two jagged shards and he waved them in front of him triumphantly, trying to imitate that already fading image of the gladiator.

Good. Say something mean.

“Wha’… what?”

Threaten him.

“You… you give me all your money!” Roen yelled.

That is not what I meant.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

Due to the positive early reviews for The Lives of Tao, the sequel, The Deaths of Tao, just had its publication date moved up to Oct 29th, 2013. Huzzah! It’ll be five years since The Lives of Tao and all hell is about to break loose. Without giving too much away, the Prophus are going into the championship rounds of a losing fight.

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Wesley Chu: Website / Twitter

The Lives Of Tao: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound

Ten Questions About Penance, By Dan O’Shea

Dan O’Shea is the real fucking deal. He’s a helluva writer and a smart guy and a man I’m proud to call my friend. Further, he’s my Alpha Clone — I’m pretty sure I’m just a watered-down version of him. Regardless, I’m happy as hell to report his first novel has landed on bookshelves and here he’d like to give you some words of wisdom about PENANCE.

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I’ll start with who I’m not. I’m not your usual punk kid debut author. I’m on the wrong side of 50 – thought the more time I spend over here, the more I think it’s the right side of 50. Been a writer my whole adult life – business and financial copy mostly, a lot of it about the tax code. And, really, a writer is all I ever wanted to be. But another 5,000 word white paper on transfer pricing, that’s not exactly the dream I had as a kid. I wanted to write stories. Got married young though, had kids, a couple of the kids had some problems. Seemed to me I couldn’t waste time writing stories on spec when there were clients willing to pay me cash on the nail for real work. Writing a novel felt like one of St. Paul’s childish things, one of those dreams you put away when you became a man. I messed at fiction from time to time, but I would go years at a stretch without writing a word I wasn’t getting paid for.

Pissed on my own dreams, basically.

Thing is, you get to an age when people start to die. In the space of a few months, my best friend died, my dad died, my aunt died – and a couple of those deaths weren’t natural. The whole mortality thing went from being an abstraction to being an open wound. It sunk in on more than an intellectual level that there wasn’t going to be a second lap around the track where I finally got to do what I wanted.

So I got serious about writing fiction. PENANCE is actually the first thing I ever finished.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

When the past won’t stay buried you have to kill it again.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

I went to a strange high school. A Catholic military academy. The school motto was Crede de Deo, Luctari pro Eo – to believe in God and to fight for him. Always confused me. I always figured if there was one guy who could handle his own beefs, it was the almighty. Just as the good people of Sodom.

Anyway, I’m in theology class my junior year and the priest pops this question. Asks us “If you were going to die unexpectedly, say you were going to be murdered, where and when would you want that to happen?”

I was leaning toward never and nowhere, but he tells us we should want to be murdered walking out of the confessional because we’d be in a state of grace and would go to heaven. Besides adding to the pile of things that were already souring me on the idea of religion, that nugget rattled around my brain for years as a great jumping off point for a story.

When I started PENANCE, that was all I had – a killer with a bizarre religious motivation for murder. The rest of it grew out of that.

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

I suppose it’s a story that any fifty-something guy who went to a Catholic military school, who had a Chicago cop for a grandfather and who had nightmares for weeks back in 1968 after watching his grandparent’s neighborhood burn on the news in the riots following the King assassination could have written.

Religion figures heavily in it, history figures heavily in it, Chicago figures heavily in it. All things I’ve thought a lot about.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING PENANCE?

Like I said, it’s the first piece of fiction I ever finished, so everything was hard. The biggest challenge was just learning the discipline, just making myself sit down every day, or almost every day at least, and knock out a couple of pages whether I felt like it or not.

Funny thing is I didn’t really have any more time when I finally got serious and wrote the thing than I did all those years I was telling myself I didn’t have time. I’m just as busy, I still have a day job, my kids still have needs, always will. So I watch a little less TV, maybe spend a little less time reading.

There is no muse, no magic. There’s you and there’s the keyboard. If you’ve got the chops to do the work then you can always do the work. Easier some days than others, of course, but you can always do the work.

I guess maybe the hardest thing was learning that, and then believing it.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING PENANCE?

Here’s one thing: a novel should be somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 words, maybe 110,000 on the high end. OK, everybody knows that now ‘cause you kids all grew up with Google. Thing is, way back in my late twenties when I had one of my brief, abortive fits of fiction writing, I got about 20K into a story, felt like I was getting traction. But I had no idea where the finish line was. Weren’t no Google yet. The internet was still a gleam in Al Gore’s eye. So I got this bright idea. Grab a book off the shelf, count up the words on a few pages, average those out, multiply by the number of pages and bingo – you’ll have a target. I don’t know what went wrong. Maybe I counted wrong. Maybe the pages I picked were all narrative and no dialog. Maybe I forgot to consider how many partial pages there are in a finished book. Maybe I grabbed a Steven King novel. But the number I came up with was 300,000 words. I quit on the spot, knew I’d never get that far.

Let’s see, what else? Dialog – learned that, for me anyway, the sooner in a scene I get my characters talking the better.

Learned to finish what I started.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT PENANCE?

The intersection of the city’s real history with the story, I love that. I didn’t grow up in Chicago – I grew up about 50 miles west. Now, I spent a fair amount of time in the city, even as a kid. We’d visit my grandparents, we’d go in to the museums, Cubs games. Then, as an adult, I commuted in and out of the city every day for decades.

But I remember watching the news as a kid. It was a pretty volatile time. The King riots, the ’68 Democratic convention after that, the Fred Hampton murder, Richard Speck, the ongoing civil rights struggles, the battles between the Daley regime and the parade of good government types that were always trying to unseat him, some alderman or county board member always being on trial for something. It was this other place where everything always seemed bigger, bolder, more dangerous – where none of the normal rules of civilized behavior that governed my immediate experience applied.

I realize that the Chicago in my book isn’t real exactly – some of it is, I think the sense of it is. But even when you set a book in a real place, that place is really a sort of parallel universe.

I like what Chicago is in my book.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

Write it when I was thirty. It would have been a different book for sure, probably not as good a book. But I can’t help but think sometimes how my life would be different if I had started my fiction-writing career a couple decades ago.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

Little more than a paragraph on account of it’s dialog, but there’s an exchange early in the book set in 1971 between a character named Clarke and Chicago’s mayor, Hurley, where Hurley’s complaining about Chicago’s iconic Picasso statue, which would still have been relatively new at the time, just a couple years old. I like the way this passage gives a sense of both the character and the city. And, like I said, it’s early in the book. It’s something I wrote in the first few weeks when I’d finally decided I was going to finish a novel. It was one of the first passages that, even as I was writing it, I was thinking, “Hey, this is some good shit. Maybe I can write a novel.”

“Fucking statue, still don’t get it,” said Hurley.

“Pardon?”

“The Picasso. Junior’s idea, you know. Public art, he says, so we can be a great city, like New York or Paris. Like we ain’t a great city already. Like I gotta put a fucking steel monkey in the middle of the Loop so we can be a great city.”

“Picasso is a genius, sir,” said Clarke. “Subjective as individual works may be, to have his work on so prominent a stage.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Make all the art critics in the world gush about us. Course you could move all the art critics in the world into the same damn place and you wouldn’t have a city, you’d have a village, cause there’s maybe a couple hundred of ‘em, and the village wouldn’t need an idiot. And then they’d all starve cause they don’t know how to do nothing. What I like about it? The Picasso? I look out on a nice day in the summer, and I see the kids climbing up that slanty part at the bottom and sliding down. Got the parents standing there, trying to figure out is it a baboon or what, and their kids play on it. I like that. Some guy from the Art Institute came to tell me I gotta keep them kids off it, that it was sacrilege or some shit. Scrawny atheist fuck in my office talking about sacrilege. Told him that Picasso might be a drunk and can’t keep his pants zipped, but at least he makes a decent slide.”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

I’m putting the finishing touches on my second novel, MAMMON, (coming to a book store near you in early 2014 from the good folks at Exhibit A).

Those who follow my blog or my short fiction career might also know I’m a bit of a Shakespeare fan boy and that I’ve messed around writing some stuff that features the Bard as an unwilling Elizabethan private dick. Not quite ready for a formal announcement on that yet, but let me just say you’ll be seeing more from ol’ Will.

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Dan O’Shea: Website / Twitter

Penance: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound