Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 212

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.

* * *

Dan O’Shea: Website / Twitter

Penance: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound

From The Journals Of John Atticus Oakes, Page #1

“And so it is with the Underworld: you may enter its depths and walk into the dark, but something is always taken from you. And it remains ever-uncertain whether your entrance will be mirrored again by your escape.”

The Blue Blazes

Coming May 27th, 2013.

Pre-order:

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

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

I Want You To Lick My Ice Cream

EW NOT LIKE THAT I’M NOT FLIRTING WITH YOU

*bats eyelashes*

*flicks tongue, licks fringe of mustache*

*combs melted chocolate chips out of beard seductively*

Anyway.

So, I like to make ice cream.

I use a modified version of the Jeni’s Ice Cream base, which is, essentially, this right here. I have been known to replace the corn syrup with honey. Because, I dunno, corn is stupid and honeybees are rad? That seems like a snap judgment but there it is.

For the record, I completely and utterly recommend the Jeni’s Ice Cream cookbook.

I also totally love Lili Chin’s We All Scream ice cream site, where she takes totally fabulous and bizarre ice cream recipes and dolls them up in adorable graphic design.

Anyway.

I am currently fond of two particular flavors of ice cream I make, and both of these are based off of Jeni’s recipes but with my own li’l twists.

Here you go.

Roasted Strawberry & Creme Fraiche Ice Cream

Cut up a bunch of strawberries. Murder them. This will feel like murder particularly because your hands will be stained red with their blood and you will raise your crimson mitts to the sky and cackle madly. You’ll scream something about vengeance. And berries.

So: one pint of little green-haired red-headed murder victims.

Chop ‘em up, mix with 3 tbsp of sugar, 1 tbsp of honey, a squirt of lemon juice.

Into the oven. Four hundred degrees for eight minutes.

Delight in their screams.

Only you will be able to hear them. This is totally fucking fine.

When that’s done, whip that shit out of the oven, let it cool down before you start shoving magmaberries into your greedy maw. Once appropriately un-hot, dump those suckers into the mass grave that is your blender and whip it into a frothy scarlet slurry.

Now, go forth and implement the ice cream base linked to above.

Go. Click. I’ll wait.

JESUS CHRIST HURRY UP.

Okay. Here’s the modifications to that –

In that bowl where the cream cheese goes?

You also want to plop in a dollop — 1/4 cup, to be precise — of creme fraiche. Just what the hell is “creme fraiche,” you ask? It’s French for “pretentious-ass sour cream.” (More seriously, creme fraiche is more stable and holds up better against that lemon juice.)

Then, at the step after you pour the already-thickened ice cream base into the creme cheese (and creme fraiche) mixture, you want to stir in 1/2 cup of the screaming strawberry slurry.

Mix, mix, mix. Blah blah blah.

Then you cool it down and glop it into your ice cream maker as intended.

(I use the Cuisinart ICE-21. Also, ICE-21 was my codename in the NSA. TELL NO ONE.)

Freeze. Eat. Shut up.

Earl Grey Vanilla With Mascarpone

Earl Grey was an Earl of Country Knoxfordshiresburg, exiled to the Hebrides for lewd sexual misconduct with a pelican. But still his special blend of tea lives on today in various tea bags across the world. Or something. I read some weird history books. Anyway — technically for this recipe I don’t use proper Earl Grey tea, but rather I use this stuff: Steven Smith’s Lord Bergamot tea. Lord Bergamot was Earl Grey’s rival, and it was his pelicans what got shagged by the vicious pelican-fucker known as Earl Grey. Again, or something.

I use six of these teabags. (HA HA HA TEA BAGS IT MEANS DIPPING YOUR BALLS IN STUFF except seriously please don’t dip your genital configuration into scalding hot ice cream base. For god’s sake, let it cool first.) You can use any Earl Grey teabags or really, any teabags at all. I don’t give a shit what you do, lady-dude. Your destiny is your own, I’d dare not infringe upon your liberty. Which makes me think of that old flag? The one with the snake saying DON’T TREAD ON ME? Which is pretty dumb if you think about it because if I see a talking snake the first thing I’m doing is treading all over the motherfucker. Probably with some deadly golf cleats.

I feel like I’m getting away from the point.

Six teabags. Okay.

First things first: with the cream cheese mixture you want to put in a 1/4 cup of mascarpone cheese. “Mascarpone” is Italian for “pretentious-ass result of when creme fraiche has sex with regular ol’ cream cheese.” It’s a little thicker and more robust than creme fraiche. Kay? Kay.

So, as you’re following the ice cream base recipe above and you mix all the initial stuff together (milk, cream, sugar, etc) in the saucepan, you also want to scrape one vanilla bean into the mix. Scraping the vanilla bean is a delightful process that makes your whole house and your fingers and your knives smell like vanilla. Just make sure nobody is staring in your windows as you take great pleasurable sniffs of your knife and your fingers. They will call the police.

I speak from experience.

Let it all do its thing.

Then, when the first four-minute boil is done, you want to drop those teabags (seriously, put your genitals away, this is hot stuff) into the mix and let them steep for ten minutes.

Do something awesome for ten minutes.

Skateboard on a brontosaurus’ back or some shit.

When you’re done with that, return, then once more follow the recipe to its conclusion. Get it in the ice cream maker and let it chug-chug-chug and do its frosty thang.

I like to cover my ice cream with parchment paper in the freezer.

I also do this with all the body parts I keep there. Stops freezer burn.

ANYWAY THERE YOU GO YAY ICE CREAM

*eats all the ice cream*

25 Humpalicious Steps for Writing Your First Sex Scene, By Delilah S. Dawson (Author Of Wicked As She Wants)

Some folks are allowed to post guest blogs here. Even fewer of those folks are allowed to take over the coveted Tuesday “25 Things” spot, but here’s Delilah Dawson anyway, with a post I couldn’t refuse if only because of the word “humpalicious” (AND ALSO SHE HAS A GUN HELP PLEASE HELP SEND HELP CALL SOMEBODY CALL ANYBODY). Delilah has a new book out today: Wicked As She Wants. You can find her at her blog or on The Twitters, and you can check out her book at Amazon or B&N or Indiebound. So without further adieu (CALL 911):

I never set out to be a romance writer. When I was asked to turn a black-out scene into steamy hot sex, at first I panicked. Then I followed these 25 easy steps and panicked some more. And then I got a three-book deal for a paranormal romance series with Simon & Schuster, despite being a somewhat prudish Southern girl who’s been married to her college sweetheart since 2002 and has never actually seen a pair of assless chaps. And you can, too! Here’s how.

1. First of all, get drunk.

See? It starts out with something easy. Pick your favorite liquor—the one that makes you loose and happy, not upchucking into a clothes dryer. Get comfortable. Light a candle. Have two drinks. Slide down in your chair. And then gently place your fingertips on the hot, slick… buttons of your keyboard. If you’ve never written a sex scene before, you’re probably going to be either terrified or embarrassed, and both of those emotions are a lot easier to swallow when mixed with vodka.

2. Pop your cherry in private.

So let’s assume you’re drunk and about to start writing words like “pert nipples”. Trust me on this one: you’re going to want to do it alone, not at Starbucks with some little old granny staring over your shoulder as some baby screeches to Jason Mraz in the background. You also don’t want some well-meaning and curious spouse or roommate butting in to ask if you could take out the trash or, even worse, to see how the pornifying is going.

3. Prepare to have hairy palms, but in your brain.

Writing sex is a lot like masturbating. It’s all in your head— what you like, what you think would be hot, what two ideal people would hypothetically do with a hypothetical saddle. And if you can translate that well enough into words, other people will be titillated and foam at the mouth for your books and stick greasy one-spots in your literary g-string. So really put your back into it.

And that’s another reason to do this alone: it can… affect you. In physical ways that can be embarrassing. Your hands might roam as you contemplate the prose, your mouth might fall open, a small moan of “Ooh, Thorin Oakenshield!” might escape you. Did you masturbate for the first time in a public place? If so… wow. Congratulations on not getting arrested, or at least on having a good lawyer. Do this alone.

4. Do not stop. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred paddles with a riding crop.

Sometimes, as a writer, it can benefit the story to leave a scene half-written, take a break, and come back to it. Not so with sex. What if someone stood up in the middle of your sweat-laced tomfoolery and went away to reblog gender-reversed Batman comics on tumblr? No, if you want it to read like one smooth, seamless experience, just write the damn thing in one heaving burst. You’ll make changes later, but don’t stop writing until the walls would look horrible under a blacklight.

5. Self editing while writing a sex scene is like apologizing during bad sex.

Just as all first drafts are vomit, and just as you need to get this scene hurled out, don’t go back and reread bits and rethink your word choices and how many times you’ve used the word “wet”. You’re going to use it a lot, if the sex is decent. Do not look back while you’re writing it or think about how wretched it is. Of course it’s wretched. It’s the literary equivalent of virgin sex. Just be glad no one’s mom is going to walk down to the basement and catch you on the pool table with your Hammer pants around your ankles.

6. Do not be a body snatcher. Unless it’s some kind of alien porn.

Some books switch back and forth between points of view, but in general, writing sex is far more fluid– HA HA FLUID– if you limit yourself to one character’s thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Not only does this help the reader keep track of pronouns and hands, but can you imagine having sex if you had to hear every single thought the other person was having? DEAR GOD, THE GROCERY LISTS. And that should go without saying– no grocery lists, even if you’re out of butter. Like Marlon Brando.

7. Consider the lowly Jimmy hat.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when a romance book neglects to take into account that most women (and men!) have very strong feelings about whether or not they wish to end up preggers after a sexual encounter. A simple throwaway line about a condom, how glad she is she took her pill, how he’s always wanted a son, or why he has a big red V tattooed across his balls should do it. You are, however, forbidden from using the phrase “the telltale rip of foil”, as 50 Shades has copywritten it.

8. When in doubt, carefully study porn. I mean, read romance. And porn.

If you need inspiration, go read the sex scenes from your favorite romances– or check out Chuck’s post about it, including oodles of recommendations. See what works for you and what doesn’t. Notice how the author builds to it, what the characters say and don’t say, the words and euphemisms and cliches used. Or– best homework ever– have sex. Or watch porn. It’s not great for emotional value, but it can remind you of the very many bizarre ways bodies can meet. As a serious writer, it’s all too easy to get caught up in word count and plot and no adverbing and OMG, is spanking in this week? But at the base of it, we’re talking about a very primal act, and practice makes perfect for doing it *and* writing it.

9. Remember setting, because no one wants splinters in their pudendum.

Another pet peeve: a virgin’s first experience takes place in Earl Humperdink’s hayloft. Sounds sexy, but have you ever been in a hayloft? Dust, dirt, cobwebs, maggots, scorpions, stray cats, tetanus-laced nails, the scent of dysenteric cows, and possibly an entire barn full of zombies. Not sexy. So if you’re putting your characters in a weird place, trespass on someone else’s property and literally roll in the hay to see how very much it pricks your prick. Try having sex on a counter, or kitchen table, or a hammock. At the very least, simulate some moves in the setting and see if you can stay upright/undiseased/free of porcupine quills. If it’s not realistic, your readers will lose trust in you. And your ability to sex.

10. Let shit get cray.

I have no idea what this means. I wrote this list at 2am while on NyQuil. LET SHIT GET CRAY sounded pretty good at the time.

11. Words to avoid, even if they’re true.

Turgid, swollen, purple, wrinkled, tumescent, pert. Those are on my list. You probably have different ones, although I suggest you add “turgid” to it right now. While some words may accurately describe sex or a sex organ, they are not, themselves, sexy. Like moist. Or penis. I mean, it’s just an awful word, and all of you men should be ashamed of having one. Read several romance books and angrily circle the no-no words to refresh your mammary. I mean, memory.

12. How cray does it get?

Oh, wait! Now I remember why I wrote #10. Your first instinct will probably be to keep things very conservative and not let your freak flag fly at all, lest people see what a truly twisted nympho you are. But “John laid Mary gently on the bed and they did it missionary style and it was nice” does not sell 1/1,000,000th as many copies as “Mr. Gray beat a clumsy teenage girl with a garden hose and then stuck it in her armpit with a scoop of pizza sauce to lubricate.” Just as you have to let things get a little out of hand, you have to know when to rein it in. How far it goes will depend on your audience, and only erotica writers can really get freaky with pizza sauce.

13. Double rainbow? Unrealistic as hell, but almost expected.

Count the number of times you and your partner have had simultaneous orgasms. Unless you’re Sting, I won’t have to wait for the tally. It happens 4000 times more in books than it does in real life. But most readers will feel better if everyone gets their happy ending, even if someone has to be finished off in some other way, or one person uses their lack of confetti cannons as character development or a sign of why this relationship with the undead wereunicorn baron… dum dum duuuuuuum! CANNOT BE.

14. Have a cigarette. But a bubblegum one, so you won’t die of the cancer.

So you’ve just written The Best Sex Scene Ever. Time to end the chapter and move on to the real action, right? Wrong. Your story needs a lull, an afterglow, a reaction to the sex just as honest as people have in real life. It doesn’t have to be all cupcakes and rainbows—maybe he storms off, maybe she runs for the shower, maybe they tell Muppet jokes while he offers her a Clorox wipe. But what happens immediately following the sex can be just as important as the sex. It may seem like a small thing, but falling asleep in a lover’s arms (or not) for the first time can be a big deal. Especially if he’s the kind of guy who has a hook for a hand.

15. Just like in real life, avoid eye contact.

Ever notice how sex often makes things even more awkward? It may scratch one itch, but then it works you over like a hungry ferret and leaves you with hundreds of new trouble spots. After sex, the characters will glance away, avoid eye contact, doubt themselves, doubt each other, maybe rethink their involvement. Chances are, one of them feels more secure than the other. At the very least, even if they’re both happy, something in your story must push them apart, or they would just spend three months in bed, humping like rabbits.

16. Keep writing, motherfucker.

Because the story keeps going. Let the new sexual tension and awkwardness play into the story’s climax, but don’t let the entire point of the book be about sex. Most romance novels have a kissing or make-out scene that surprises both characters early on; one very detailed “first sex” scene somewhere between halfway and three-quarters of the way through; and then at least one other, “Oh, okay, we’re good at this; let’s hump HARDER scene” closer to the end. Your mileage/sexytimes meter may vary. But keep writing until it’s done.

17. Bad news: Hemingwway said you have to edit sober.

My writing process = vomit up an entire first draft, leave it to marinate slone in the dark, edit. Which works for sex scenes, as I need to get some distance away from them to really see them with new eyes and clean them the hell up. At the very least, don’t write the sex scene on Monday night and expect to perfect it on Tuesday morning. Go away for a while and let the fetid, bleach-like funk dissipate and harden. Then bring a chainsaw instead of a mop.

18. Don’t forget the granny.

Remember that granny at Starbucks? You can call this one Delilah’s Rule: The dirtier the scene you’re attempting to edit at Starbucks, the older and sweeter the granny that sits beside you. You can’t avoid it. Just be ready to show your aggressive introversion with headphones and slightly cant your laptop to the side. Because granny’s curious. And she probably misread the word “cant” and already thinks you’re a horrible person.

19. Count hands. Find panties. Provide tissues.

The little details can make or break a sex scene, for a reader. Have a clear idea what the characters are wearing before they start to get undressed. Make sure everything—or at least the obstructions– get removed in a sexy fashion. Make sure he takes off his socks and shoes if he gets totally nekkid, because… have you seen porn? Ew. Make sure there aren’t six hands touching that chick if there’s only one dude involved. When I wrote my first sex scene, the hero accidentally removed the heroine’s corset three times, which made me sound like an idiot with a corset fetish. AS IF.

Oh, and if you have one of those scenes where the guy “leaves his sperm” in “her vagina”, she can’t just stand up and slip on a short skirt and play tennis. If you don’t know why, ask your sex ed teacher. Give the girl a shower or a tissue or SOMETHING.

20. Hello, thesaurus. Goodbye, thesaurus.

The first time you edit your sex scene, you’re going to see these words a thousand times: hand, fingers, lick, taste, tongue, thigh, skin, hot, wet. Because… those are very accurate descriptions of the main tools of sex. You’ll want to vary usage so that it reads seamlessly. Be careful of using the thesaurus too much, though, because some words are too accurate and unsexy to work. “He laved her creamy pillows until his penis turned purple” might be true, but dry heaving should not be a reaction to sex scenes. If something stands out to you, rework it. Put your thing down, flip it, and reverse it.

21. Make it a jackhammer.

Remember in Mallrats, where they were doing the dating show, and the suitors were asked if their kisses were like a soft breeze, a firm handshake, or a jackhammer? Gil answered, “Definitely a jackhammer, I’m in there with some pressure and when I’m done, you’re not the same as before. You’re changed.” And we laughed, because he was a douche. But your sex scene should be like that: it should move the story forward and somehow affect the characters emotionally. Maybe the hero learns to open up, maybe the heroine decides she wants to be more aggressive in her real life, maybe they’re just having what they think is a last fling before a giant orc battle. But it has to mean something, or else it’s just porn.

22. Ask someone else to read it and give you their honest opinion, preferably not a clergyman.

This is possibly the scariest part. With my first sex scene, I blushed and handed it to my husband. His response? “That’s hot.” And then I put down the bottle of wine. What works for you might not work for someone else, and you need an outside source you trust to tell you gently if your menage a trois with a penguin is just too much.

23. Edit again. Really. Did you count the hands?

Polish that rocket with a little extra elbow grease. When your regular book is rejected by agents or editors, it hurts like hell. When they softly and gently critique your sex scene, it’s like being kicked in the ‘nads and being told you’re a horrible lover. Do yourself a favor and really make it gleam, first.

24. Buy yourself some pretty new panties, sport.

I’m a big believer in letting shit go, especially things that have served their purpose. If you’ve written the scene, edited it, shared it, cried, accepted the criticism, edited again, and hit the send button? Forget it. Don’t stay up at night, thinking about how there really were four hands and a rogue penguin flipper on her freckled mound. Just put the entire book, story, WHATEVER, right out of your mind and start writing the next thing. Let those raggedy-ass panties with the stretched-out elastic go and buy some frilly ones, possibly in that exciting new “Tonga” style.

25. If anyone complains, do not fling used condoms at them.

Truth? For some reason, I can read bad reviews and nod along and think, “Yeah, okay, I guess I can see that; my entire book is Buffy/Pirates of the Caribbean cross-over fanfic.” But when a review says the sex isn’t hot, cites parts of the sex scenes negatively, or otherwise critiques that hot, steamy pile of lovin’ I concocted? I cringe. And it’s going to happen, every time. As a writer, you must understand that this says as much about the reviewer and their sexual issues as it does about you and your writing issues, and that you therefore—even more than usual—cannot say anything in response or defend yourself intelligently. Just shrug, watch some porn, watch some more porn, and write harder.

Because you know what? Writing sex makes you feel powerful. It’s like lingerie for your brain. It doesn’t matter what you look like, how you dress, how you feel about your body, or how you can dance: if you can write a sex scene, you can turn people on with nothing but words.

And that’s pretty turgid.

Quickie Blackbirds Kindle Giveawaypalooza

I’m going to give away five copies of Blackbirds on Kindle.

This is open only to US residents because, well, I can’t gift copies outside the US.

It’s 12 noon EST right now.

You’ve got till 3PM EST to play ball.

Three hours.

Here’s how you win a copy:

Leave a comment below with your favorite piece of creative profanity. The standards will not apply — we’ve all heard “fuck” and “shit.” Let’s hear something new.

(Example: “cock-waffle.”)

Impress me with your vulgarity.

I’ll pick five winners this afternoon and boom, free Blackbirds e-book.

For the rest of you, Blackbirds remains $3.49 at Amazon and has popped into the Top 20 Urban Fantasy releases there (this, a year after its release!). Thanks, all.

Now get thee to a cursery!

EDIT!

We have our winners!

“Muggle-fuckers.” Wren Roberts (bonus points for her being named after a character in Mockingbird, which provides nice parity, here.)

“Pink-eyed jizz-whistler,” Cameron Clemons (so jaunty! so fun!)

“Festering pile of diseased feces covered in the aborted senate bills of a bygone era.
” – D. Moonfire (really, it’s the “aborted senate bills of a bygone era” that is most profane)

“Cock-kicking fuckpucker.” –Megan Hart (pure art!)

“Picklesniffing turdmonger.” – Hilary Monahan (vulgar while still utterable by a toddler!)

And a runner-up that will not win because I am a jerky-faced stickler-jerk for spelling, but just the same, I love it oh-so-very-much:

“The YouTube comments of a menstrating badger.” – John Gardner

Wren, Cameron, D. Moonfire, Megan, and Hilary –

Email me the email address where you want the e-book sent.

Hit me at terribleminds at gmail dot com.

E-Z Zerts

I like to cook.

But I’m hell with desserts. I do make a mean ice cream these days (recipes forthcoming for my strawberry creme fraiche and Earl Grey vanilla mascarpone ice creams), but for the most part, I’m fucked when it comes to taking a tram-ride to Dessertsville.

Desserts?

MORE LIKE DESERTS AM I RIGHT?

…

I’m not proud, no.

Anyway, let’s hear your dessert recipes with one qualification that I’d really like said dessert recipes to be fairly easy. (Double-points if it includes no baking, but that’s by no means a requirement.) Assume I’m a dessert dipshit, and answer accordingly.

I’ll hang up and wait for your answer.

*click*

Blackbirds: $3.49

“Fast, ferocious, sharp as a switchblade and fucking fantastic.”
– Lauren Beukes, author of Zoo City and The Shining Girls

* * *

Looking for an excuse to buy in and try out Blackbirds?

The first Miriam Black book is now just $3.49 for Kindle and Nook:

Amazon

B&N

(The paper books are on sale, too, at Amazon or B&N.)

(EDIT: B&N has already bumped it back to $6.49?)

I’m poised to begin work on The Cormorant this week (playlist incoming over the next day or three), so now’s a good time to jump in and check out the first book in the series. Book #2, Mockingbird, is already out, and The Cormorant drops in December of this year.

It’s actually been a year now that Blackbirds has been out, so thanks all for checking out the book and saying lots of nice things and leaving a wealth of spirited, positive reviews. For a book that took a long time to write and get out into people’s hands, it’s been very satisfying.

You rock.

Hope you dig the book.

*disappears in a puff of black feathers*

Flash Fiction Challenge: The Titles Have Been Chosen

Last week’s challenge: “Titular Titles.”

So, I’m going through last week’s almost-300 entries of titles (damn), and I’ve gone ahead and chosen favorites. I picked ten I really, really liked, and then I picked another three on top of those ten (for a total of 13), and these three (titles bolded in the list below) should email me at terribleminds at gmail dot com to WIN SOME KIND OF SOMETHING. It’s a surprise. Shhh.

Your goal is to take one of the following titles below and write a short piece of flash fiction (~1000 words) using the title chosen. Post it at your blog or online space, link back here and the comments. Due by May 3rd, noon EST. No contest this time. Just write to write (and to be read).

The top ten titles are, drum roll please –

Grave Deeds (S.T. Cameron)
Resurrected, by Wife (Oshvat)
The Death and Life of the Human Electrode (Albert Berg)
Those Shoes Are Not Apocalypse Friendly, Francine (Daphne Bee)
Always Have A Exit Strategy (Josh Loomis)
John Wayne and the Mystery at Medicine Hat (Wren Roberts)
Paved Meat: A Roadkill Romance (Bob Bois)
Three Miles Left to Regret (Jason Heitkamper)
The Ballad of Scrawny River Fawcett (Allen Morgan)
You Don’t Bring Me Dead Things Anymore (Chantal Nair)
Life in Snowglobia (Michelle Palmer)
Stand-Off On Memory Lane (Kai Kiriyama)
The Window-Washing Boy (Jenny R)

So, if you’re Jason, Michelle or Jenny, you should email me.

The rest of you ought to get writing.

Ten Questions About Arclight, By Josin McQuein

It’s really exciting when I meet someone on this blog as a commenter and, a couple-few years later, they’re here with a book about to hit shelves. Josin McQuein is one such person, and here she’d like to drop by and give you the news about her newest, Arclight:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I am me and you are you. Together we are we, which is far too close to being a “them” for my taste, which probably accounts for my anti-social tendencies and total lack of humor.

I’m human, the last I checked. More specifically, one of the female variety, but for the purposes of your question, I’m a writer who did that thing people kept saying was impossible – I got someone to publish my stories.

I live in tiny Texas town you’ve never heard of, which is on the outside of a large city that you most likely can hum the theme song to. There are three dogs in my house that think I’m their boarder / chef, and I am hopelessly addicted to ellipses…

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Arclight’s about playing God when you don’t have the credentials, and choosing if you will define yourself by your rules or someone else’s.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

Ants.

Army ants, to be exact.

The first kernel of what became the Fade started with an interview I saw as a kid. A group of hikers had been trekking through the rainforest and stopped at a hotel for the night. In the middle of the night, they woke to the sound of screams, but couldn’t see anything because the generators had to be shut off after a certain time to conserve fuel. The hiker said that in the moonlight, the wallpaper seemed to be “moving.” He grabbed a flashlight and discovered that army ants were marching down the walls of the rooms, devouring everything in their path – including the scorpions that started leaping from the ceiling beams onto the people below to get away from them.

That idea of something so small, yet unstoppable for its number, combined with a bit of pseudo-scientific theory and fermented in my brain. And the fear of the dark is fundamental.

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

Ha! That one’s easy. Only I could have written Arclight because before it was Arclight, it was “the Franken-novel,” with bits cut and pasted from other books, but mostly the screenplay I wrote when I was a teenager. Interestingly enough, not a single one of the component pieces was YA. They all had adult casts and heroes.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING ARCLIGHT?

Getting all of the pieces to line up.

It’s difficult getting a story to work under the best of conditions, but when you’re in the head of a girl whose memory only accounts for a few weeks, and then you’ve got another major character who’s non-verbal for several chapters, things get complicated.

It’s like someone being born full-grown. You’re working with instincts, rather than experiences, and the character’s having to learn to interpret movement, language and tone the way an infant would, in a way. How do you connect to someone who’s been severed from everything she’s ever known?

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING ARCLIGHT?

Fanfic habits die hard. Seriously.

I was the kind of fanfic writer who liked to give backstories or alternate histories to the less featured characters. It’s now translated into me wanting to give elaborate histories to every character, no matter how integral the details are to the plot. I could probably write five novels based on different characters at this point.

Also, I cannot do hard copy edits. I just can’t, and I think I may have driven my poor editor nearly insane figuring that out. I’ve got some sort of perceptual glitch that refuses to acknowledge that words struck through on paper have been deleted; I can’t read it that way because I can still see the words. I have to see my edits in Track Changes so that I can “delete” sections and then put them back if I don’t actually want to cut them.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT ARCLIGHT?

Can I say the fact that it got picked up for a movie option? Because that’s right up with my favorite things. No? Okay, fine, I’ll give you a serious answer -

The ambiguity of everything.

I *hate* stories where things are so rigid in the idea of “good” and “evil” that the characters should come into each scene wearing white hats and black hats. No one makes hard choices. No one gets their hands dirty. In fact, no one does much of anything other than swoon.

On the surface, ARCLIGHT looks like it’s set up that way, with the world clearly divided between light and dark. But I wanted to write the exact opposite, so that maybe you end up in a situation where there are no absolutes. Good guys can be jerks and villains can have moments of compassion because in their minds they aren’t the villains.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

I probably wouldn’t write in 1st present. It gives you an inside look at what’s going on with the main character, but you miss some of the background action because she’s not there to see it, and I refuse to have scene after scene of her being told what happened when she left the room, or some such nonsense.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

The amorphous swath of no-man’s land called the Dark is literally the stuff of nightmares. When the Arclight’s citizens put heads to pillows at dawn and close their eyes, it’s the Dark that lays behind them. Phantoms and ghosts of fears which have compounded on top of each other for generations churn in a new primordial soup that gives birth to the worst. It creeps like the misty fog beyond our boundaries, and it’s into that void I’ve now traveled.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

Edits for Arclight 2 – things are going to get a lot darker, both literally and figuratively.

October 8th, I’ve got another novel coming out from Delacorte – PREMEDITATED – which is another YA, but contemporary.

I’m polishing up a dark Red Riding Hood retelling/fantasy – most likely to self-publish. (No werewolves, though. I’m not sure when the wolf in RRH became synonymous with werewolf, but people make the assumption.)

I’ve got a slightly steampunkish YA fantasy series about to make the rounds, along with a MG ghost story in-progress. Ideas are not something I lack in any capacity.

Josin McQuein: Blog / Twitter

Arclight: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound

25 Things Writers Should Know About Traveling

1. What They Mean When They Say, “Write What You Know”

Note the lack of the word only in the old writerly chestnut, write what you know. It is not meant to be a limitation. It’s not meant to be a restriction. It is meant to be an option. A way to bring ourselves to the work. This is why travel matters: we go places, we absorb new details, we have new experiences, we meet strange people, and then we bring all those funky little details back and screw them into the story-slots where they belong. They do not form the only layer within our stories, but real details — and real places — provide a crucial and compelling backbone.

2. Travel Pours New Stuff Into Our Heads

Writers make shit up. It’s part of our resume. We’re basically a gaggle of liars and daydreamers. We crack open our heads every day and all kinds of candy-floss nightmares and unicorn lies come tumbling out of the fissure. Still, though, we aren’t pulling things out of some imaginary asscrack; these things we invent aren’t delivered to us by huffing cave vapors or handed to us by the gods themselves. We make up things using the information we already have. We can imagine what a thing is like through context and comparison. Travel gives us new information. It hammers new details irretrievably into our fool heads. So when it comes time to write about, well, anything at all, our travel experiences offer us one more vein of story-gold to mine.

3. Sometimes You Just Had To Be There

It can be hard to write fairly and completely about some places if you just haven’t been there. Some experiences are fundamental that way. If you’ve never been to the beach or the desert, if you’ve never really seen or dealt with snow, anything you write about those things may ring a little hollow. It’s like writing about sex without ever having had sex — there’s likely going to be some part of the description or the storytelling that feels a little off. (“I don’t think the penis goes inside the belly button like that. And one most certainly does not ejaculate marshmallow and confetti.”) You can use as your basis other books, or film, or television, but it isn’t always the same thing. Sometimes, you just have to go to a place to get a place.

4. The Veneer Of Authority And Authenticity

Part of this is about the reader, part of this is about you-as-the-writer. For the reader, you’re giving them a sense of authenticity and authority, right? You’re making yourself sound credible and honest, even though what we do as writers is lie, cheat, steal. We’re magicians and con-artists but the power of the magic trick or the confidence game is, of course, seeming authentic. And in that term, “confidence game,” is the key for the writer, too — traveling to a place gives you the confidence to write about that place more easily and completely. You won’t slow your writing by trying to figure out how to write about something you’ve never seen — all the stuff will come pouring our of your fingertips. Ejaculating, if you will. Like marshmallow and confetti.

5. Interpreting The Real As The Unreal

Writing is not always an act of transcription. It is frequently one of translation. We take the colors we have on our palette and we mix them into new colors (“Blue and orange make BLORANGE!”). People always get hung up on write what you know when it applies to truly fantastical fiction: “Well, I’ve never made love to a randy satyr on the red sand beaches of Blood Island, so I guess that story is totally fucking dead.” We bring our current slate of experiences and translate them to fictional contexts, infusing even the most fantastical of tales with the breath of the real. Example: in my new novel The Blue Blazes, I write about the Sandhog tunnels beneath Manhattan. I’ve never been there. But I have been in silver mines and limestone caverns and I took those memories and translated them in part to another place and time. Just because you’ve never fornicated with a satyr doesn’t mean you haven’t banged a goat. … wait, forget I said that last part. Uhh. Totally don’t have sex with goats. *runs away*

6. Is This Place Very Similar To Another Place?

I would love to tell you that every place is a glittering snowflake demonstrating each its own unique fractal fingerprint, but yeah, no, not so much. If you’ve been to one Pennsylvania suburb, you’ve been to a lot of them. Hell, that means you’ve also been to a lot of suburbs in Ohio, New York, Maryland, and on and on. Specific suburbs might carry specific feelings or vibes — and the farther you physically go, the further apart those details grow, too. A suburb of Santa Fe is not the same as a suburb of Philadelphia. Still, we can’t always get to the places we want to go in terms of travel, so we do as best as we can. Maybe you can’t get to the Himalayas but you can get to the Rockies and, fuck it, it’s just gonna have to do.

7. Focus First On The Physical

Physical details matter: how sand feels between your toes, how the wind whistles through the trees, how that stretch of Interstate-80 always smells like someone rubbed chickenshit all over your face. You go to Hawaii, you notice how profoundly the air smells of flowers. You go to Philadelphia, you notice how profoundly the air smells of angry sewage and cheesesteaks.

8. But Really, It’s Made Of People

People and culture are what really matter about a place. Who they are. What they do. The stories they tell. Part of the reason I’m even writing this list is that I recently traveled to the Florida Keys to do some research for the third Miriam Black book (The Cormorant) and lemme tell you, the people of the Keys are their own breed. The Keys seceded from the United States for like, ten minutes in 1982, calling themselves the Conch Republic, and this independent fuck you vibe still goes on there. (You can tell it when a cashier at a Publix grocery store starts yammering at you unbidden about the unfairness of “mainland taxes.”) And again, the farther you go, the further you get from known cultural traditions — while we’re all pink on the inside, Afghani warlords and New Jersey housewives are going to have different attitudes and traditions. (Though I’m sure they’ll have shared traits, too, because, hey, that’s how humanity rolls.)

9. That Means You Do Need To Talk To Some Other Humans

If you live in a place, you’ll eventually absorb stuff by dint of being there. If you’re traveling — particularly as an act of research — you’re going to have to hit the ground and ask some questions. Even though we’re scaredy-cat writers who’d prefer to talk to perfectly made-up imaginary motherfuckers (or our cats), we gotta put boots on asphalt and open our mouths and talk to bartenders or bankers or hookers or whoever it is we dare to meet.

10. Stories Live Inside Other Stories

Little stories slot into bigger stories. The stories that people will tell you? Use them. The stories that you experience while traveling? Use them. These personal — and real — accounts will turn a rote plot into a complicated and potentially nuanced story.

11. Avoid The Tourist Shit

Er, I don’t mean the places the tourists pooped, though one supposes you should avoid those spots, too. No, I mean, the standard, “All the tourists go to this spot to watch the harbor seals ride the trolley and then right after buy sticky caramel-covered chocolate lighthouses because the lighthouse is where Abraham Lincoln first invented the credit card. Everybody does it.” Sometimes as a writer you gotta say, well, if everybody does it, I gotta do different.

12. Hop The Guardrails

Escape the gravity of the highway. Flee the known ways. Find the narrow paths, the hidden roads. AND THERE YOU WILL BE SWEPT AWAY ON A FANTASY ADVENTURE WITH ELVES. Okay, maybe that one just happened to me? Whatever. You’ll find compelling things, places and people away from and off of the standard paths. Dive bars. Restaurants where only locals eat. A part of the island where nobody really goes. Long as it’s safe to you (“They don’t go to that part of the island because of the feral man-eating pandas”), look for stories in stranger places.

13. It’s The Little Things

They say the Devil is in the details, but that sounds terrible. It’s like, every time you start writing down the little things, the Devil pops out and eats your face or tempts you into gulping down a fistful of synthetic heroin and going on a kitten-punching spree. Hell with that. The details are what matter when you travel for writing: the big, sweeping facts you can get from a book, a website, a buddy. But it’s the little details, the ones that speak to the place you traveled, that matter. Be observant. Note the way the wind moves through the trees or the fact they eat some food here you’ve never even heard of or how once a year they capture a traveling writer and trap him inside a giant wicker typewriter and burn him alive to appease “the Muse.”

14. Hey, Whatever, At Least It’s Blog Fodder, Man

Worse comes to worse, traveling somewhere can always make for good blog fodder while you wait to see how you’re going to use it in your fiction. Case in point, this is a blog post about traveling. THIS IS METABLOG. Which is also the Lithuanian god of horse meat. Mmm. Horse meat.

15. Travel Ain’t Cheap

The downside of traveling for writing is that it isn’t cheap. I mean, writing for travel tends to be cheaper than vacation travel — on a vacation you’re trying to stay at the nicest places you can afford, you’re eating out every night, you’re buying snowglobe souvenirs, you’re securing the finest sea-salt-sprinkled liquor-filled chocolate-covered prostitutes… I mean, desserts that you can find. A writer likely travels on a shoestring budget: staying at hotels where the carpets are marred with Macbeth-style bloodstains, eating at roadside taco stands (or worse, stoning local crows to eat them over a barrel fire with the other hobos).  Just the same, flying can be pricy. Renting a car can be a killer. Expect it to not be nearly as cheap as you’d prefer.

16. But, It Is Tax Deductible

If you’re a professional writer, hey, you can deduct the trip from your taxes. It’s a small but potent boon, so you might as well enjoy it. If it’s research or in the service to research, you can deduct food, gasoline, coffee, liquor, tacos, jet ski rentals, trips to BDSM clubs, trapeze classes, gladiator monkey fighting, chapstick, whatever.

17. Even Short Trips Outside Your Smelly Writer Cave Can Help

A whole world awaits those willing to take a short day trip. Caverns and canyons and mountains and beaches and little towns and big cities and gladiator monkey arenas. These can be affordable and time-sensitive and can still grant you narrative mileage in terms of research.

18. The Purposeful Penmonkey Versus The Wandering Word-Hurler

You can take a trip with focus: meaning, you can say, “I’m going to set this story in the bowels of a blue whale and so I will endeavor to be ingested by a blue whale in the name of narrative authenticity,” but you can get just as much value out of a trip that has no specific focus at the outset. You may say, “A hundred miles north of here is an abandoned tuberculosis hospital haunted by the noisily coughing specters of the consumptive dead and so I’m going to drive there in the hopes of maybe being inspired today or even five years from now.”

19. It Can Protect You From Rookie Move Amateur Hour Karaoke

You’re writing a book about Seattle but you’ve never been to Seattle and so you’re forced to make up some details here or there and next thing you know, all your Seattle readers are saying, “The space needle is not an actual needle in space, and people in Seattle do not all have humpbacks, nor is ‘grilled parrot’ the  city’s favorite dish. I HAVE CAUGHT YOU AND EXPOSED YOUR FOOLISHNESS, SILLY WRITER.” Nobody wants that. Do your research. Take a trip there if you can, or set the story in another location. Or at least use a disclaimer at the fore of the book: “I have never been to Seattle and I’m just inventing fresh shit so SHUT UPPA YOU FACE.”

20. Travel Writing > Guidebooks

Most guidebooks suck. Or, rather, they suck for this purpose. Finding Zagat-rated restaurants or well-rated burro-rides is not really useful for your purposes. However, many interesting locations are described in books of travel writing, where the authors tend to interject non-fiction content (essays, even) focusing on the location at hand. Traveling to the Keys recently I found a great book that seems like a guidebook — “The Florida Keys, A History And Guide,” by Joy Williams — that is anything but. Funny, wise, with lots of commentary and quirky wisdom on where to really go and see, these types of books are essentialy to understanding a place. Frankly, they’re useful even if you can’t travel somewhere.

21. Take Notes Or Die

If you’re anything like me (may the gods help you), you have a brain like a spaghetti strainer. Which means you’d better, whilst traveling, take copious notes or you’ll return and two weeks later wonder where you even went or how you got those bloodstains in your wetsuit. Notes will help you transmogrify the travel experience to the wordsmithy desired.

22. Ask: “How Would I Write This?”

Here’s a tip that works when traveling but also applies to your day-to-day existence: when you see something, particularly something new or as-yet-unexperienced, imagine how you’d write it out. How would you describe it? What value does it have in a story, to a character, as a motif, or bound up with a theme? Imaginary exercise can be quite fruitful.

23. Sometimes You Can’t Travel

Even when you want to. Costs too much. Time won’t allow it. They won’t let you back into Myanmar after you got that tiger addicted to high-test trucker meth. So many reasons. You do have other options for when travel isn’t an option: Google Street View, local blogs, local newspapers, travel writing, guidebooks (in a pinch), social media (poll the hive-mind).

24. Travel With A Mission In Mind

Go with a goal. It pays to travel with some sense of what you hope to accomplish. It’s fine to wander amok, but if you can travel and know what you’re looking for, you can plan accordingly and hit all the right spots and talk to all the right people and seduce all the right goats I MEAN WHAT NOTHING ABOUT GOATS YOU STOP PUTTING WORDS IN MY MOUTH.

25. Travel Is Good For The Soul

At the end of the day, travel opens us up. It reveals the world to us (and one might argue, helps reveal us to the world through our fiction). One of the many jobs of The Writer is to reveal what we know to the rest of the world, to transport people to the places inside our head and out of it, too. Travel is good for us. Seeing other places and people and cultures makes us more complete as human beings. The fact that it is useful to our word-herding is almost secondary to how useful it is to us as people, not just as people who sling stories for a living. So go! Get up! Move your sluggardly nether-cheeks. Escape the chair. Flee the desk. Get out into the world. See things. Explore. Talk. Absorb. And for fuck’s sake, report back. Because you are still a writer, after all.

Want another hot tasty dose of dubious writing advice aimed at your facemeats?

500 WAYS TO TELL A BETTER STORY:

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER:

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

500 MORE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER:

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING:

$0.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY:

$4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY:

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF